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SOUTH Africa’s fragmented labour movement has had two major wake-up calls to which unions have so far given an inadequate response: the first is the global reality of ongoing job losses, largely the result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the second is the highlighting in recent weeks of the potentially huge economic power the unions could wield.
And, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap, it may be too much to hope that labour will confront these realities and adapt accordingly. Yet, if they do not adapt, there is every likelihood that they will continue to prop up the very system that they claim to oppose: a system that has seen joblessness grow and the wage and welfare gap widen grotesquely.
This is the antithesis of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), launched with such hope and fanfare in 1994 and which the labour movement unanimously supported. And a united labour movement went on to agree a transformative economic policy programme in 1996.
However, that was the same year that the RDP was, to all intents and purposes, effectively dismantled while labour’s policy proposals were ignored.
The ANC government’s alliance partners, the SA Communist Party and Cosatu, condemned as the “1996 class project” this move away from the RDP. But while they bewailed what was happening, they remained within the alliance and part of the government, so ensuring ongoing divisions in labour.
Bell maintains that the major reason for this is the “poisonous belief that unity of the organisation must be maintained at all costs”. It is an argument that change can only come from within; that if unity may be imperilled, corruption and abuses of various kinds have to be tolerated.
Bell sees this as a cancer that became embedded in the ANC from the early years of exile. He says it allowed corrupt elements, usually with real or perceived factional support, to survive and thrive. They continue to do so although the centre can no longer keep everything in check.
In such conditions he feels the unions could play a crucial role in uniting, on a democratic basis, to encourage real transformation that would benefit society as a whole. But he is not holding his breath.
* Add your voice or just drop Terry a labour question. Follow Terry on twitter @telbelsa.
