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Labour Wrap: May Day’s crucial lesson

THERE is a crucial lesson to be learned - especially by the labour movement - as a result of the tumultuous events on May Day, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap. It is about the nature of united fronts or the “broad church” structure led by the ANC.

He maintains that this lesson has probably not been widely acknowledged, let alone learned. And with many agendas in play, and a multitude of pronouncements from various interested parties, he feels it is no wonder that confusion exists.

The events on May Day, especially in Bloemfontein, were an embarrassment to the leadership of the ANC. But it was Free State premier Ace Magashule who suffered the greatest embarrassment when the national rally in Bloemfontein had to be called off.

He blamed “outsiders” for the booing and disruptions, and claimed that all workers in his province were members of the ANC and supported President Jacob Zuma. This, says Bell, was a variation on the increasingly desperate and strident claim by senior ANC sources that their broad church remains intact and essential.

READ: May Day booing sign of a healthy democracy, says unfazed Zuma

But what happened on May Day was a clear indication of the major schism in this proclaimed broad church. It is a schism that has been 20 years in the making. In fact, the first indications came in 1993 when Nelson Mandela backtracked on the question of nationalisation when speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

But it was only in 1996 that the basis for the eventual rupture became clear. This when the combined trade union movement issued their macro-economic policy proposals in a document entitled Social Equity and Job Creation. The document, based on years of research by the ANC’s own Macro-economic Research Group, prioritised redistribution before growth.

The unions were responding to a proposal by the business lobby to have policies that prioritised growth – the now largely denigrated “trickle-down” theory. Government then responded with its own version of trickle down theory, the Growth Employment and Redistribution outline.

Gear became the new doctrine of the broad church. Senior members of Cosatu and the SA Communist Party, while still quietly expressing political heresy, donned the robes of the ANC and sang together in the Parliamentary choir from the hymnbook of neo-liberalism.

Those days appear now to be gone, says Bell. And the essential lesson to be learned in a multi-party parliamentary democracy is that only one broad church is essential: an intensely democratic trade union movement that organises all workers as workers. 

* Add your voice or just drop Terry a labour question. Follow Terry on twitter @telbelsa.

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