A hand-lettered placard captured the intensely political implications of the August 2010 public-sector strike in South Africa. The placard read: ‘Comrades stay together, just like buttocks. When buttocks separate, 7% (shit) comes out.’ Seven per cent was the ‘final offer’ from government negotiators, which precipitated the strike when teachers and hospital workers rejected the offer despite their leaders.
The strike reflected two sets of tensions. First, the strike took place amongst persistent tensions between the trade-union federation Cosatu and the group around Jacob Zuma, the man backed by Cosatu against Thabo Mbeki, in the ruling African National Congress (ANC). It brought the number of strike days for the second year of Zuma's presidency to rival 2007, when public-sector workers last went on strike in the dying days of the Mbeki regime. These two massive strikes are responsible for the highest strike levels since the end of apartheid, and possibly in the whole of South African history. Like the 2007 strike, the 2010 strike took place in a volatile political climate. After a short lull in protest, the Zuma government has had its hands full putting out fires. There has been a resurgence of delivery protests (Sinwell et al. 2009, Alexander 2010, Alexander and Pfaffe 2010) and Zuma is struggling to hold together ‘his increasingly fractious allies’ (Plaut 2010, p. 201) amongst a series of public spats with members of the ANC Youth League and between Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Zuma's faction has kept up a patient ideological appeal for its own ultimate authority – admonishing Julius Malema, for example, in Zuma's speech to the National General Council for failing to respect his ‘seniors’ – but it has not proved easy to put the lid back on. Cosatu has been more assertive towards government, which had thumbed its nose at Cosatu over demands to ban labour broking. The union federation's Central Executive Committee had released a document assessing the early days of the Zuma government which concluded that: ‘The post-Polokwane period has been highly contested … despite some important gains, we are far from realising the bold vision set out by the ANC delegates in 2007’ (Cosatu Central Executive Committee 2010, p. 1).
Until now, the usual fire extinguishers have worked: presidential visits to some townships defused delivery protests for the time being (Alexander 2010, p. 11), and the logic of collective bargaining eventually damped the strike, as I will describe below, but the Zuma government is sweating.
The strike was not only a test of the Zuma government but also a test for Cosatu's strategy to achieve change by influencing policy through their alliance with the ruling party. It revealed a second dimension of contradiction, arising from the different pressures on union leaders caught up in collective bargaining, and the members. In part, the tale of the 2010 strike is a classic case of containment, with Cosatu playing both conflict manager as well as strikers' interlocutor in collective bargaining. The strategy of relying on the alliance to achieve policy reform deferred the immediate issues of the strike to the political kingdom, as in 2007 (see Ceruti 2008).
But the strike also demonstrated that the elastic holding the grassroots to the alliance has been stretched, for some, to new limits by renewed expectations in Zuma. The spike in strikes and protests is not unlike the 18 months after the 1994 elections, where people took confidence from the defeat of apartheid and the notion that ‘our government’ was in power. In the decade following, the concept of ‘our own government’ worked as a leash on dissent within the alliance of the ANC, SACP and Cosatu. But more recently, the concept has acquired an edge of demand for accountability: as by the unionist who said, ‘I think government is taking advantage of the fact that we are the people who rallied around government’ and another striker who complained, ‘It is extremely unfair because we all fought for this freedom, which we deserve, all of us.’1 The tale of the strike is, therefore, also simultaneously a tale of strikers forming explanations for the bewildering realities they experience in the strike, and sometimes groping for new styles of striking. This element, all too often obscured in political analyses, remains the less predictable element in forecasting how things will unfold.
1. The fire this time: what caused the strike?
In the 2007 public sector strike, the leadership of the unions was kicking against their marginalisation in the alliance, which encouraged the fighting spirit among a membership under increasing economic pressure (Ceruti 2008). In 2010, members forced the strike onto a leadership who were either reluctant to strike or naively believed they would not have to. The behaviour of three key collective actors in the 2010 strike was crucially shaped by the reformulation of the alliance that put Zuma at the head of the ANC.
Relations between President Mbeki and Cosatu were already developing stress fractures when strikes began to revive from 2004, alongside the growth of the township delivery protests. After a high in 2007, few strike days were lost in 2008, in the period when Zuma had been elected president of the ANC but before the national elections made him president of the country.2 The rhythms of strikes in South Africa are affected by three-year wage bargaining arrangements in some of the biggest sectors, but the fact that delivery protests also decline in this period (Alexander 2010, p. 28) suggests that people, on the ground and in leadership, were deferring expectations to the renewal of the ANC leadership. Zuma had not been particularly supportive of the public-sector workers during the 2007 strike; when asked to comment on that strike, after speaking at a union congress, he refused to take a side (e.tv, 7 pm news broadcast, 12 June 2007). But the ANC conference in Polokwane in December 2007 promised to resolve public-sector workers' grievances.
In 2009, the year of the elections, strikes began to creep up again. In 2010, Andrew Levy Employment, a labour law consultancy that monitors strikes, reports about 1.25 million working days lost to strikes in the six months through June (double the number compared to the same period in 2009). The 20-day strike by state employees added some 10 million days, and various strikes in the motor sector brought the figure to around 14 million days lost by the end of September 2010.
Several strikers reported in personal communications with me that the 2010 strike was ‘called suddenly’ without proper preparation (see also Gentle 2010, p. 3). It seems that the leaders of Nehawu, the Cosatu-affiliated health workers' union, and SADTU (South African Democratic Teachers' Union), the teachers' Cosatu affiliate, expected cooperation from government. They even agreed to hold off from declaring a deadlock until after the soccer World Cup. Hassen (2010, p. 4) believes they drew confidence from the fact that public service minister Richard Baloyi had, in 2009, agreed easily to above-budget salary adjustments.
Government negotiators may have been counting on the union leaders' reluctance to strike (Gentle 2010). Government was under two sorts of pressures. First, World Cup expenditure went well over budget and the economic crisis was biting. Second, giving in too easily to the demands of the teachers and hospital workers could encourage the sense of entitlement already causing headaches in the resumption of the delivery protests.
The constraints and demands of their different positions would conspire against the best intentions of union and government negotiators to understand their comrades. On 11 August, after a one-day ‘warning strike’ in Pretoria, the government tabled a ‘final offer’ of 7% and R700 housing allowance. By ‘final’ they meant that the offer would go to arbitration in 21 days, with or without the unions' signatures. At that time, the teachers' and health workers' demands were 8.6% and R1000 (about $150) housing allowance. Cosatu's general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, believes this extraordinarily clumsy ultimatum was an unwitting blunder arising from the honest belief that the union leaders could deliver the members' cooperation (Vavi 2010, p. 2). Gentle (2010, p. 3) by contrast, believes the government deliberately sought confrontation to stamp its authority. Either way, it is difficult to see how teachers and health workers would take a ‘final offer’ at this stage as anything other than a provocation. Union officials, sensitive to accusations of unaccountability after the campaign against Mbeki, appeared on television announcing that members had rejected the ‘final’ deal, and that the full-blown strike was to start on 18 August.
What made the third actor, the public-sector workers, ‘very stubborn’, as one striker put it? Apart from their day-to-day financial difficulties (see Gentle 2010) the evidence of World Cup expenditure was used as an illustration that money could be found for wage increases if money could be found for stadiums (author's observations and photos). Beyond this, Cosatu's statements about slow progress affirmed strikers' expectations that the Zuma government should be sympathetic to their demands. Finally, some strikers had begun to generalise, seeing their grievances as part of a wider set of grievances. In 2007, most strikers I spoke to were unsure how to view the delivery protests. By 2010, the development of the political period encouraged most to see the protests as similar to their own dispute.
Sentiments directly implicating Zuma, not only his ministers, developed quickly and sharply in the 2010 strike. Strikers interviewed during the warning strike shared with 2007 strikers an ambiguous relation to government: they approached it in its role as employer (embodied in ministers) as the strikers' enemy, but simultaneously entreated it to ‘listen with both ears’ to the strikers in their roles as The Elected and as alliance comrades. But, as early as the warning strike, strikers were saying things like ‘Zuma promised us a lot of things but I see nothing, nothing has happened.’ During the strike, amongst the homemade placards reminding the public of the value of their work, teachers and health workers enjoined Zuma to ‘Remember Polokwane promises’, reminded him that a teacher taught him to read and that strikers donated to his support fund when he was on trial, lambasted his sexual habits, and warned him not to bring home any more babies or wives from his state visit to China during the strike. (Zuma has five wives and more than 20 children). Songs such as ‘Uskebereshe’ (slut) appear on the surface merely as crude slurs, but imply that people go to Parliament only to sell themselves to the highest bidder. More than one placard recommended Vavi for president and appealed to the SACP to stand in elections.3
So the reshaping of the alliance produced a contradictory effect: it re-established some measure of loyalty between leaders and government, restoring their faith in collective bargaining. But its effect on workers was to heighten expectations and therefore to heighten militancy around a sense of righteous demand when those expectations were disappointed. That contradiction affected the development of the strike.
2. Caught between the comrades and the comrades
The unfolding of the strike is partly the story of the contortions of union negotiators caught between betraying their ‘comrades in government’ and betraying their members. The pragmatics of collective bargaining take precedence over strategising the strike. This develops into a conclusion which shakes many strikers.
Government's response to the strike was decidedly uncomradely. By day two of the strike, police had attacked strikers at several hospitals and fired rubber bullets on a crowd of teachers who walked onto a highway near Soweto. Zuma appeared on national television repeating a polite refrain about the right to strike, but asserting the government's right to fire essential workers – in particular nurses – who joined the strike (Sapa 2010) and condemning ‘violence and intimidation’ on picket lines. Court interdicts were filed to prevent soldiers, police and prison guards from joining the strike, and to prevent municipal workers from joining a solidarity strike. It is only much later, some 10 days into the strike, that Zuma ordered negotiators back to the table.
Cosatu was about to release its economic proposals ahead of the ANC National General Council, scheduled for September, and could not afford a defeat of its biggest sectors. The proposals were intended to feed into the government's new economic growth plan (finally released in November). The strike presented an opportunity to shift the balance of power. The danger for Cosatu lay in the conflict developing into an all-or-nothing showdown with those expected to consider Cosatu's document. Cosatu faced its own delicate balance between asserting the programmes for which they had deposed Mbeki, without destroying relations with the Zuma government who were, in this strategy, key to getting these plans implemented.
Against this background, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi played a central but contradictory role throughout the strike. Vavi was not afraid to play up the political implications of the strike, leading a government spokesperson, Themba Maseko, to complain that government was worried by the anger being displayed by trade-union leaders: ‘We are beginning to see and hear too many statements that are taking the strike beyond labour relations. It worries us,’ he said (Business Day 2010). At a march in Johannesburg 12 days into the strike, on 26 August, Vavi echoed strikers' anger in a declaration, borrowed from the Cosatu Central Executive Committee, that ‘the alliance is once again dysfunctional’, and lambasted ‘predatory elites’ in the ANC (Cosatu Central Executive Council 2010). On the same day he announced that the federation had filed the necessary notice to call a one-day general strike in solidarity with the public workers. But at the same time, he was working hard to help the parties find each other at the table. Vavi describes this role in a remarkably unselfconscious letter responding to SADTU accusations that he had sold them out (Vavi 2010). He says that the negotiators were ‘acutely aware how difficult it was for government to move’ and describes a number of attempts to reach a compromise on figures suggested by the public-sector union officials, but apparently not caucused with their members.
When Zuma ordered the parties back to negotiations, strikers were enormously hopeful, and Cosatu called off the general strike before anything had emerged from the new negotiations. The offer that came back, however, was just 0.5% more. Adding to the confusion, Vavi announced the offer and recommended on public radio that unions should accept it before the unions had taken the offer to their members. According to Vavi's letter, he decided that nothing more could be won when government negotiators received a call at 3am, after which they ‘folded their folders and went home’. Vavi's reading is that they felt betrayed by their union comrades who had twice promised they could sell a deal to members, only to be told the members had rejected it.
Strikers were furious at the deal and at Vavi's public announcement, but also demoralised. Picket lines which survived police attacks shrank after the new offer was announced on 1 September. Nevertheless a substantial core of strikers remained ‘stubborn’. A Nehawu document shows that the vast majority of hospitals reject the offer, although most staff of clinics had by then returned to work (personal communication). In a speech at a teachers' meeting I attended, the Johannesburg Central chair of the teachers' union, SADTU, reported that the majority of SADTU regions had rejected the offer, then lambasted Vavi for announcing the offer before consultation and lambasted him even harder on the grounds that strikers had mandated leaders to take their demands forward, ‘not to go and find out whether government could afford the deal’.
Despite the widespread rejection of this offer, and although SADTU refused to sign the offer, a suspension of the strike was imposed from above on 6 September (SADTU 2010). Both Vavi and Nehawu officials argued that it was impossible to reject the deal because the picket lines had dwindled. Yet as the strike wore on, they had provided little leadership on creative ways of intensifying or broadening the strike, and indeed even the crucial call for a general strike is revealed to have been, in Vavi's mind, mere posturing for the bargaining chamber rather than a real possibility.
On the other hand, strikers were not organised on the ground to resist the suspension and have yet to develop their own collective strategic imagination. Officials and office bearers from the different Cosatu unions met during the strike, but teachers and health workers did not, except sometimes during picketing. Without a meeting that brought together strikers from different sectors and unions, the high morale of the Johannesburg Central region could not easily affect health workers, who were more despondent towards the end of the strike. While strikers themselves discussed strategy on the smaller hospital picket lines, the big, lively teachers' meetings in Soweto consisted mainly of hard-hitting speeches from the platform without discussion amongst the strikers. This fragmentation limited creative strategising.
A crucial weakness in the strike was that no effort was made to build a community campaign in 2010. (In 2007, rudimentary efforts were made in Soweto.) This left the strikers at the mercy of the press – which was virulently anti-strike – in judging public opinion of themselves, so that they felt more and more isolated as the strike wore on. Similarly strikers made no attempt to decide for themselves who should be an ‘essential worker’ despite government's failure to agree on the definition of essential worker, by setting up their own committees to keep a skeleton staff going in hospitals, thus building public sympathy.
Strikers I interviewed were ambiguous about the suspension of the strike but generally disgruntled at the manner in which it was ended. There was an element of relief – the ‘no work no pay’ rule was biting – and many strikers were concerned about patients and learners, feeling embattled by the relentless media barrage against them. Yet no one I spoke to was satisfied with the deal, and there was deep dissatisfaction with the way Vavi announced the deal and the way the strike was ended, even among strikers who accepted the logic of bargaining. Health workers in particular came across as depressed and tired at the suspension of the strike. Soweto teachers, who could at least retain some respect for their own leadership, seemed more upbeat but nevertheless furious with Vavi. A shop steward in a hospital, who had been resolutely resistant to any criticism of union leaders in the 2007 strike complained openly and bitterly about them this time. A former striker who had subsequently changed jobs read Vavi's intervention as using the strike to advance political agendas.
Early in the strike it had become clear to strikers that the ‘comrades in government’ were not automatically on their side. Suddenly it had become, at least momentarily, a little unclear whose side Vavi was on.
Vavi, the unions and the strikers did have alternatives. But the Zuma government had painted itself into a something of a corner and the stakes were therefore high. A strategy to seriously build the strike could have affected the balance of strength with regard to policy but would also have meant a much bigger confrontation. Vavi's eyes were on a more modest prize.
3. The aftermath
For the Zuma group in the ANC, struggling for control over conflicting interests, the spectre of the 2010 public-sector strike is the spectre of an alliance with a union leadership unable to control its own members. The ANC's over-reaction to Cosatu's civil-society conference shows they are nervous of this prospect. It reflects also in the government's New Growth Path, released in November, which recognises the need to placate labour, but makes no major concessions to it in terms of the overall economy. The growth path is a break with classic neoliberalism – for example it asserts a greater role for the state and the need for a certain amount of social welfare – but it is by no means the Keynsianesque dream drafted by Cosatu. While Cosatu was at pains to point out that it had not rejected the Growth Path, it said it rejected ‘the macroeconomic framework underpinning it’. This is a little like saying you are fine with the colour of the car, but do not like the internal-combustion engine. Most of the concessions to Cosatu take the form of targets or intentions, such as the intention to create five million jobs, rather than policies. And, crucially, these promises come at a price: the plan calls for wage restraint for workers earning as little as R3000 a month. And the centrepiece of the plan, step number one in the government's view, is a social pact between capital, the state and labour – an industrial alliance to reinforce the still-shaky political one.
On the ground, the political residue of the strike is harder to discern. After the 2007 strike, most strikers found ways to rationalise a less-than-satisfactory settlement. The danger here is that adaptation to disappointment turns into demobilisation: a first-time striker said she ‘now understood’ those second-time strikers who ‘just stayed at home to do their housework’ during the strike. However a still-restive residue was evident in the skirmishes which continued after the strike was over, between the militant Johannesburg Central region of the teachers' union and the Department of Education, and when delegates to the national SADTU Congress booed a government minister who had been invited to speak at the congress (Weekly Mail 2010). Vavi had to tour from congress to congress repeating his justification for his role, and the role of the public-sector officials, in the strike.
The Zuma government desperately needs to tie the unions again, but the possibility of rifts between the government and Cosatu have not closed, despite Vavi's recent reassurances that the ANC leads the alliance. Such stresses will continue to challenge orthodoxies about the alliance. What remains to be seen is whether members will develop ideological and organisational alternatives to current strategies, and how members' interpretations of these events will affect Cosatu's strategies in the future.
Note on contributor
Claire Ceruti is a researcher attached to the South African Research Chair in Social Change, in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. She is currently researching class in South Africa, and completing a PhD on the development of consciousness during strikes. She has been active in strike support and social movements since the mid 1980s.