I greet you in the name of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa – Numsa. We are the biggest union in the history of the African continent. Despite massive deindustrialisation in our country, during which hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been destroyed, Numsa’s membership has grown by 55% over the last 4 years. In 2009 we had 219,000 members. By the end of January this year, that had gone up to 341,150. During this period of huge potential for working class struggle in South Africa, Numsa is truly a dominant force.
Before I go on to tell you what has been happening in South Africa, I want to acknowledge the historical relationship between Numsa and Unifor
Numsa continues to value the relationship between NUMSA and Unifor. We are indebted to you. We know that Unifor has a bright future. I want to spend a minute or two tracing the relationship between our two unions. When our relationship started, of course, we were Numsa and CAW. I want to acknowledge in particular the contributions of Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, academics who worked with the union at the time.
I was among those in 1995 who worked with CAW to write education material. It was material which presented a critique of globalisation. You must remember that at the time globalisation was being presented to us in South Africa as a panacea:
It was CAW who cautioned us very firmly against the agenda of neo-liberalism. Watch out for this globalisation, they told us. It is nothing but a continuation of imperialism. The bosses are using the new ideology of saying that government has no business in business. So CAW bolstered us so that were cautious. That was a huge contribution to our working class ideological consistency, and it can be traced back to the CAW’s contribution.
It was CAW who warned us to watch out for corporatist practices which would lead to demobilisation of the masses and the working class. Soon enough we had a new Labour Relations Act. It gave us rights but it also constrained us – no longer were we able to strike when a worker was dismissed. Instead there was a process. A new tripartite structure was put in place, called Nedlac. It isa consultative forum of government, business and labour.
It was CAW who helped us to start to understand the new management techniques of lean production that were being adopted internationally. We learned to analyse its agenda to co-opt shop stewards, calling them ‘stakeholders’ and ‘social partners’.
In Numsa, CAW will always be held in high esteem. When everybody else was giving in to globalisation, CAW demonstrated that it believed in workers. CAW supported us when we rejected the bosses who said There Is No Alternative. We understood that there must be an alternative and that we can produce our own working class solutions.
We can confirm with Unifor now that the Washing ton Consensus has failed. We were right then. We are right now. Neo-liberal policies are bankrupt.
We must continue to debate as 2 unions and to maintain a consistent political posture and challenge the continuation of neo-liberal policies.
We want to share with Unifor how we see the challenge for the working class today:
Having said all this, and over and above it, our immediate task is to build a very vibrant mass and massive trade union movement. As a union we have been consistent with this path against the backdrop of the crisis of capitalism. And we are the only union that is growing massively. Therefore we think that the way the labour movement in our 2 countries will grow is to build trade unions that understand working people and working class communities as a window through which to see the distant future
While I am talking about the relationship between our unions, I want to pick up on one specific project. Last time we were here there was an initiative that retired CAW people will help us to produce strategic material on restructuring. That project in particular should now make progress.
I also want to raise another possibility. We have a clear objective to modernise our use of ICT. We want to develop our collective knowledge systems and improve our internal communication. We need to break new ground around technology and we see a role for you in helping us to do that.
Now I want to turn to developments in South Africa
Many of you will have heard that, in the last 3 months, Numsa has led a major restructuring of the South African political landscape:
What I want to do today is to give you an overview of the developments in South Africa which have led us to take the decisions we have taken:
Firstly let’s look at the neo-liberal policies of the ANC government
The South African government has consistently pursued a neo-liberal macro-economic strategic direction. It started with the government’s adoption, in 1996, of a strategy called GEAR – Growth, Employment and Redistribution. GEAR has had other names since then but it has always remained fundamentally the same. Broadly it has been a strategy to open up South Africa to rapid imperialist penetration. It has allowed South African monopoly capitalism to evade expropriation and to avoid taking any responsibility for the colonial system.
I can give you some examples. You will be familiar with many of the policies:
And yet, whilst the ANC government was pursuing these neo-liberal policies, it already had a fundamental policy document – the Freedom Charter. And its policies were direct violations of that charter.
The Freedom Charter contains the founding principles of the Congress Alliance, led by the ANC. Let’s look at some of the key provisions of the Freedom Charter:
Despite the provisions of the Freedom Charter, at the end of 2012 the ANC adopted its National Development Plan – the NDP. This is the Plan that now forms the umbrella for all government policy until 2030. I just want to give you a couple of examples of its flavour:
And if we look at the repressive apparatus of the state, we see that it has fallen into line with this economic strategy. In the second half of 2012, the leadership of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party demonstrated that it had clearly and unequivocally taken sides with international capital against us. Firstly, on August 16, 2012, in Marikana in the North West province of South Africa, the armed forces of the state mowed down 34 workers who were demanding a living wage from an international mining company, Lonmin. It has emerged clearly, from evidence to a Commission of Enquiry, that this was a pre-meditated, calculated assault by the police. One startling fact is proof enough. Early in the morning, long before the assault took place, the police ordered more mortuary vans than ambulances to be present in Marikana.
Then, a few months later, during a farmworkers strike in the Western Cape province, more workers were killed by police. Now, in the last few weeks, working class and poor people have been killed by the police for protesting about conditions in their communities.
Our people are protesting because they have no water. There is nothing more basic to life than water. And yet the State…. that very same state which failed to supply them with water….kills them for their protest.
The class character of the South African state has been revealed for all to see.
And what are the results of these neo-liberal policies?
What do we mean when we say there has been no fundamental change to the structure of the South African economy? We mean that we retain the same dependence on exporting raw minerals, the same enslavement to the Minerals Energy Finance complex, that was the key characteristic of the apartheid economy. Far from an increase in the manufacturing sector – the sector which can really produce jobs – we have seen a rapid process of deindustrialisation. We are not gaining jobs, we are losing them.
So the productive and wealth-producing forces of our nation are increasingly owned by global capital, not by South African capital. The results are clear for all to see:
And it has become clear that the ruling party cannot even meet its own goals
In 2004, the ANC announced a 10 year programme it called Vision 2014. Since we have now arrived in 2014, I will give you a few examples of how reality stacked up against the vision:
So, what we have done to oppose this strategy?
As Numsa, we are proud of our militant heritage. Our union, right back from its beginning, has taken the side of the working class and the poor. We have always been a union that champions shop -floor struggles as well as the struggles of working class communities. We have always understood that workers come from communities and live in communities. Community struggles are workers’ struggles.
So, as metalworkers we fight for policies and strategies that will create jobs. We want more working people from our communities to have jobs. We fight for water. We fight for houses. We fight for the safety of our communities. We fight against a police force which kills our people when they protest because they don’t have water. Because they don’t have houses.
A key part of ANC and SACP strategy is to weaken the federation
Our federation, Cosatu, has been deeply divided over the last year. The divisions have paralysed it. Now they have come to a head. In the last few days, Cosatu’s current leadership has demanded that we, as the federation’s largest affiliate, must give them reasons why they should not expel us. What has caused this to happen? What is the fundamental rupture in Cosatu?
Towards the end of last year, we joined with 8 other Cosatu affiliates in requesting the Cosatu President to call a special congress of the federation. We realised that the only way to resolve the crisis was to call together the worker delegates and let worker control of the federation solve the problem.
The Cosatu Constitution is clear and unequivocal. If more than one-third of the affiliates call for a Special Congress, the Cosatu President “must” call a Special Congress. It doesn’t say “may”. It doesn’t say “should”. It says “must”. Despite the fact that the 9 affiliates represent more than one-third of the affiliates, the Cosatu President has repeatedly refused to call the congress:
As a union, we have been in the trenches with revolutionary forces within the liberation alliance led by the ANC and SACP. Yet when we speak out clearly in defence of the working class and the poor, our allies attack us:
That brings me to the Numsa Special National Congress
We called our Special National Congress because we understood that there will be no significant improvement in the conditions of the working class and the poor until we fundamentally change direction. We, as a union, have understood that the ANC and SACP will not lead that change.
We know that the current leadership, the very same leadership that calls itself anti-imperialist, is in reality in a lucrative alliance with international capital. It is a leadership which, in the name of Black Economic Empowerment, accepted shares in the major companies of the South African mining industry. But those shares were not given for nothing. We have a saying in South Arica – “nothing is for mahala which means nothing is for free”. They had a price. And the price is being paid by the working class and the poor of our country. The price is a macro-economic strategy which focuses on maintaining profit for global capital, not jobs for South African workers.
There is only one way to create the number of jobs that are needed in South Africa – the number the NDP dreams about. That is to harness the profits of the mining and financial sectors and use them to build manufacturing industry. That is why we call for the nationalisation of the mines and the financial sector. It is not some dogma from the past. It is an immediate and urgent requirement.
We understand that for the investors in London and New York and Berlin, South Africa is just another possible investment destination. They don’t care about the working class and the poor of South Africa and we don’t expect them to. But now our political leadership has aligned itself with the global looters. Our political leadership is no longer able even to represent the interests of the majority of the South African capitalist class. It has a conflict of interest. Its real, material interest lies in the profitability of the globalised mining and financial sectors. That prevents it from looking after the interests of the mass of its own population – the interest of creating jobs by building our manufacturing industry.
We called our Special National Congress because, as a leadership, we needed to seek a fresh mandate from our members. In our 9th Congress in 2012, we were deeply critical of the ANC leadership. But we called on our members to “swell the ranks” of the ANC so that we could build its working class cadre. After our 9th Congress, the ANC adopted the NDP, slaughtered workers at Marikana and launched an all-out assault on us in our federation. The conditions had dramatically changed.
And our members made their views extremely clear in our Congress. We circulated discussion papers throughout the union before the Congress. There was vigorous debate in our locals and regions. Resolutions were consolidated at national level and then sent back to the regions for further consideration. Our objective was simple – to identify where we agreed as a union and to be clear about the points we still needed to debate. We are justifiably proud of our democratic heritage. Because we debate openly and democratically, we know that what we decide has the backing of our members.
So what was the nature of our final Congress Decisions?
I said at the beginning of this presentation that I would return to the decisions of the Special Congress. Let me explore them in a little more detail:
So we have now launched a campaign which will take us through the whole of 2014. It is a campaign of rolling mass action, using provisions in the Labour Relations Act that allow for protected strike action in support of socio-economic demands. Our first one day strike will take place on 19th March. Our first set of demands centres on the fundamental restructuring of the economy to create jobs through building manufacturing industry. When it comes to the young people of South Africa, we demand from the government:
And we demand from employers:
We are calling for the working class and the poor of South Africa to demonstrate in their numbers on March 19th that we have had enough. The nation must be protected from those who are destroying it. March 19th is the beginning of our rolling mass action throughout 2014. We are starting to build the irresistible force that will force fundamental change, in the interests of the majority.
And we are calling on the working class of all countries to see that our struggle in South Africa is part of the struggle of the international working class as a whole. We must come together to support the working class struggles as they erupt around the world. We know that the working class is on its own. There are no capitalists who will help us.
So we are calling on you for your support. Support us by mobilising in your own ranks and explaining our struggle. Support us with your ideas and your expertise. Support us with your resources. We have recently launched a Numsa Institute designed to lead our research around industrialisation and manufacturing and around policy development as we move to build the United Front and the Movement for Socialism I have described to you. We need resources to keep that institute running and to expand it.
And we need resources to expand our struggle into the continent of Africa. We need to mobilise for manufacturing and industrialisation on the continent as a whole. Africa is a continent rich in minerals. Yet it remains caught in a debt trap as countries of the more advanced world make profit and create jobs on the back of the minerals that come from our soil. We need to lead a fight back against the widespread looting of our mineral resources that feeds the profits of the advanced world.
I want to end by quoting from a hero of the South African struggle – the late General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, Joe Slovo. He helped us to understand the nature of trade unions:
“A trade union is the prime mass organisation of the working class. To fulfil its purpose, it must be as broad as possible and fight to maintain its legal status. It must attempt, in the first place, to unite, on an industrial basis, all workers (at whatever level of political consciousness) who understand the elementary need to come together and defend and advance their economic conditions. It cannot demand more as a condition of membership. But because the state and its political and repressive apparatus is an instrument of the dominant economic classes, it is impossible for trade unions in any part of the world to keep out of the broader political conflict.
Especially in our country, where racist domination and capitalist exploitation are two sides of the same coin, it is even more clear that a trade union cannot stand aside from the liberation struggle. Indeed, the trade union movement is the most important mass contingent of the working class. Its organised involvement in struggle, both as an independent force and as part of the broad liberation alliance, undoubtedly reinforces the dominant role of the workers as a class. In addition, trade unions’ and workers’ experience of struggle in unions provide the most fertile field in which to school masses of workers in socialist understanding and political consciousness.”
As Numsa we are doing what we can to follow in that tradition.