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Zwelinzima Vavi, the former general secretary of labour federation Cosatu, was the convener of the steering committee for this weekend’s workers’ summit. He spoke to Dewald van Rensburg
CP: Why do we need a new federation? What does a federation achieve?
Vavi: The trade union movement has been fragmenting at an alarming rate, but it has not translated into more workers belonging to unions. More and more workers do not find unions appealing. Only 26% of workers belong to unions and it is declining by the day.
You know what that speaks to? Unions have been defocused from the bread and butter issues of their members. There has been too much political shenanigans. More importantly, most workers join unions to get protection of their jobs. No union or federation can claim it has been successful at stopping the jobs loss bloodbath.
So what we need is to broaden the unity of the workers. But this unity must now cut across the usual political and ideological differences. It must cut across the usual racial or skills level differences. It must unite blue collar and white-collar workers, white workers and black African workers.
CP: Only one existing labour federation, Nactu, is involved. Is the idea to dissolve them, create a new super-federation?
Vavi: That is what we are discussing on Saturday at the Workers’ Summit. What kind of unity will we build? 50 unions, which includes all affiliates of Nactu, will come together and ask how will we practically do this.
There is a view that says in order for us to achieve that unity we must build a new federation that will be independent, democratic, fighting, militant, united and all of that.
Others say that maybe we should look at confederation. Fedusa holds that view. Others think that leads to paralysis...its too complicated. Workers will never be able to truly speak in one voice if there remains fiefdoms all over the show in competition with one another.
CP: What do you think should happen?
Vavi: My very strong view is that there should be one federation, one country. There should be a new way of organising workers across all the sectors so that we express our principle of one union, one industry in recognition of a changed economic circumstance.
CP: That was a key principle in Cosatu that lead to a lot of strife.
Vavi: Exactly. The international experience is for unions to amalgamate in recognition of the fact that capital did not stay static. Things have changed.
The vertical organisation seems to be what is being embraced by workers all over the world. Any strict adherence to a one-union-one-industry will simply weaken the workers.
I think one of the biggest areas of discussion we are going to have as we move towards the formation of a new federation will be how do we manage this?
How does this become an issue for more solidarity instead of more divisions and strife?
CP: Several people in that room will be from unions that try to organise the same workers. So are you willing to dissolve or amalgamate a union? To what extent does the leadership of a union have an interest in keeping their union intact?
Vavi: Nothing is closed to debate. Those issues are real. There are histories here that are important, there are colours and logos that are important and there are huge emotional attachments to all of these things. There are political and organisational considerations, all of these things matter. We have to tread very, very carefully.
The aim here must not be a big push to force unions into amalgamation without them seeing a need to embrace this unity in the practical sense so that the members, not the leaders can be the beneficiaries.
CP: So unions have to recognise that the thing they organise has changed?
Vavi: It is going to be a discussion that will require input from experts, people that could do research to look at how this restructuring by capital has impacted on the lives of workers. Can you for example say that SA today still has a mining industry that is not linked to the manufacturing industry?
In lots of sectors that does not make sense anymore. Can you say that agriculture can be on its own today without agroprocessing?
CP: What about domestic workers? They have always been unorganisable.
Vavi: The domestic worker issue is the most difficult subject among trade unions all over the world. It is no longer limited to the domestic workers. Lots of small scale clothing and textile work is home-based. It is a nightmare to organise because it is easy to reach out to workers and you can find them in all of the suburbs.
The issue is to service them, to protect them against victimisation in an isolated workplace. That’s what makes it a nightmare. Its going to be a huge challenge.
Let’s face it, the SA trade union movement is no longer seeing itself as a broader labour organisation.
CP: How so?
Vavi: A labour organisation seeks to speak not only on behalf of its members. It acts, speaks, campaigns, mobilises workers across the formal and informal sectors. It must unite workers in the workplaces - and workers who are unemployed.
CP: Don’t some workers have opposite interests?
Vavi: Very much so. In the context of SA’s apartheid history and our colonial history there is no doubt that our history benefitted white workers. The latest Employment Equity (report) just reinforces that. We are making no real progress. It is scary.
Inherently, there are those that are benefitting, there will be those workers who are aspiring. That usually leads to a clash and that is why white workers will tend to aggregate under a white union and why black workers will tend towards having a union that champions their aspirations.
They (white workers) are better paid, they are better skilled and they enjoy better protection and better job security. That makes unity very difficult. But to keep the status quo on the basis of those divisions will be committing treason towards both black and white workers. Unity must arise and be based on fairness. Fairness means that there must be redress and there can be no negotiations about that.
CP: But you need to make a case to both sides, and the case you make to one is not the same as to the other...
Vavi: The dynamics are the same dynamics as unity between black and white at a macro level. The question every person must answer honestly is whether it is in the best interest of any South African, in the long term, to keep black workers in squalor and black communities like Alexandra facing that level of deprivation and hopelessness. Is it in the best interest of our stability to keep Sandton largely white and with levels of opulence that can only generate more anger.
Keeping the status quo is a risk to everyone.
I think you are in a better position to build this level of consciousness if the workers belong to a single federation.
CP: When things were falling apart at Cosatu, you started using the term “social distance” to describe the root of the problem. Is there a way to avoid an aristocracy developing when you have large unions?
Vavi: One reason why I don’t want a big rush to a new federation is that I would hate to see a replication of those mistakes.
The issue of a social distance between leaders and their members is what gave us Marikana, basically.
It happens at every level.
Fulltime shopstewards had been given cellular phones and laptops and air-conditioned offices. The unions negotiate for them to get better salaries because they won’t get promotions.
It becomes an area of competition, tension and stress.
Then there is the social distance between the shopstewards as a collective - and their members. Shopstewards these days have greater possibilities of being targetted by management, which wants to weaken the unions, for promotions. So they easily end up in the human resources positions and they are more likely to be driving the posh car in the next year and all of that.
That creates tensions in the workplace in that workers now say ‘ag look the union is about giving opportunities...’
Between those local shopstewards and the regional leadership there is all manner of differences. Salaries being one of the issues.
When you have all your general secretaries and provincial secretaries on medical aid schemes and housing allowances, they are moving out of the townships into the former white-only suburbs. They don’t know the experience of sending your kids into dysfunctional schools or hospitals.
You create a different class within the working class. It is a different experience. It is another society. We have got to have an open discussion about that.
CP: What can you do about that?
Vavi: Ai, it is not an easy thing. Unions before 1994 used to have a much flatter salary structure. It was very flat. I remember the ratio was that it must never be more than 1 to 6. The GS must not earn more than six times the lowest and the lowest paid is the cleaner in most cases, or the security at the door. That was the idea. That thing was blown out of the water when unions lost so much skilled staff to government. They needed people and we lost almost everything.
Cosatu in particular was forced to go back to the drawing board. Suddenly everybody saw a 100% increase in their salaries to try and keep people inside the unions. But in keeping people inside the unions you are opening the gap between them and the reality that there is no 100% increase for their constituency.
There was no such debate before 1994.
The cars we drive now...In the beginning there were no cars to start with. It moved from no car to a 1.3 Toyota Corolla or a small Golf and all of that. Now it is into the 3 Series the 4 Series and the A4’s and the Q this and that. I mean, things have improved among the union members. There is a layer above the worker, the layer of some form of an aristrocrat.
CP: So where do you intervene? You can’t cut wages ...
Vavi: They will walk away, the professionals inside the unions will just walk into government and into the private sector. I don’t know, it’s going to be difficult. And yet, it is an absolutely necessary discussion.
CP: How do you create a federation, which will probably not be welcomed by the largest existing federation, without it turning into a fight? What happened between Amcu and NUM was very exceptional, but...
Vavi: Look, one worker died for example in East London in clashes betwen Fawu and Saccawu in the past. It happens rarely. Before NUM and Amcu there was the Five Madoda and the Mouthpiece Union...All of them were not legitimate unions, but they were an expression of frustration.
That is what was common about them. For example the Five Madoda and the Mouthpiece were demanding that workers must be paid their retirement funds now. So, you can say those workers were mislead, but there was something that caused that to be fashionable at a particular time.
It would be very sad if such a rivalry would lead into wars in the workplace and workers turning against each other. We should avoid that. Better education about what the real enemy is must continue going forward...
Only 26% of workers belong to unions and that is where the focus must be, the 74% that are unorganised.
It is because they are the more difficult ones to unionise.
CP: A union by definition represents workers, people who have jobs.
Vavi: Then you are speaking on behalf of something that is declining...What SA needs is a broader labour movement that will seek to unify the unemployed with the employed, informal sector with the outsourced, outsourced with the permanent and so forth. If you can’t do that, then you are slowly becoming a labour aristrocrat. And suddenly the DA, the right wing, makes sense.
CP: What can such an organisation do for unemployed people?
Vavi: There are so many things. A new federation must for example, as a matter of its ordinary campaign, campaign for the destruction of the colonial economy, campaign for the destruction of the monopolies that control the economy. It must, as a matter of course, campaign for industrialisation, decent work, a social wage, better transport, better schools, better education, better training. It must campaign for a comprehensive social security system.
Above all, a trade union movement in the meantime must be able to take up issues of placement, and to fight for learnerships in every workplace. It must create its own unemployed worker centres where workers an organise themselves and coordinate the submission of their CVs. It must have a permanent desk that coordinates the actvities of those unemployed people.
CP: How have attempts to do this kind of thing fared in the past?
Vavi: Because of the social distance your preoccupation becomes the next negotiations. Only. That exludes the people for who you can’t negotiate wages for.
I was saying to the Numsa Bargaining Conference that if Numsa were to submit to this round of negotations anything that does not speak to the workers selling bananas and apples and cuttting hair outside, then they must know that it is not talking to the workers in the whole of the metals industry. That’s how you build unity.
By taking up the issues and uniting them through practical solidarity actions. The workers in the informal sector must know that if the union loses the strike then they also lose.
We’ve got to break down the cultures that have developed. In most unions today workers are only active during the salary negotiating season. That has made workers believe that unions are only good for that.
And unions have not even succeeded on that front.
Income inequalities in this country have been growing.
The issue of percentage demands has perpetuated inequalities. By nature, a percentage means different things....That is why the issue of demanding rands and cents has become so popular among workers. The demand for R12 500 is one of the most popular demands that workers identify with today because it speaks to flattening the hierarchy.
CP: SA is characterised as a place where strikes are too long. A strike is a cost to workers. It is their major tool, but is it being used well?
Vavi: An union can never have a powerful strike if it organises only a small section of workers. The 26% factor is a big issue. That is your first problem.
The second problem is that when you have levels of unemployment that work to the advantage of the bosses. Marx and Engels spoke about the labour reserve. It is so easy to replace strikers. It is so bloody easy.
Then there is a technical issue, number three.
You don’t go on a strike that you are not sure that you will win. A good strike should be three to seven days.
But once it is on a third week or fourth week, you are in a crisis because of the levels of poverty and the fact that there are no strike funds in the country and the employer knows that. There has been no appetite to build strike funds in this country.
CP: Why is that? Unions do control a lot of money.
Vavi: I don’t know. There were resolutions and resolutions in Cosatu to build strike funds, but no. Even now, I am told some unions in Cosatu are worth billions, but why are they not putting one billion into a strike fund?
CP: How do you feel about how the student OutsourcingMustFall movement, at least at some universities, achieving what unions couldn’t for decades?
Vavi: True. Let me tell you what was the big difference between the Feesmustfall and the traditional union placing of demands in rounds of negotiations. The Feesmust fall is instant, it is impulsive, it is based on today and it does not apply for a negotiating section so-and-so.
Then when there is a dispute it doesn’t go through the normal giving of a notice and the CCMA and when there is a 48 hour strike notice...
No, the feesmustfall and outsourcingmustfall is workers assembled along with students in the afternoon and they march tomorrow and they are disrupting the whole life of the university and they force a deal.
They were very successful.
Another example, a political one. The levels of anger against Jacob Zuma in about Nkandla, about Waterkloof, about the constitutional court, its a long list, but let me tell you the tragedy.
Our tradition is to have a consultative conference and then after two weeks we plan a march. By that time the anger has dissipated and no one is coming to that march and people think that ‘ag, he is unbeatable, he is immune’ and it goes on.
When the people of Iceland hear that the wife of the PM has an offshore account they occupy the streets that day.
CP: How long until you have a federation up and running?
Vavi: Well, lets see what they say on Saturday. The steering committee has said up to four months, which is October this year. There is a huge pressure for an identity, for a home for independent unions.
