These days unionised workers are often older, says Imraan Buccus. (Supplied)
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These days unionised workers are often older, says Imraan Buccus. (Supplied)
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The bulk of the unemployed are not formally organised and until this barrier to unity between the working class and the poor is overcome unions will not be able to have either the political power or moral authority that they once did, writes Imraan Buccus.
There has not been a more joyless May Day holiday in our democratic history than the one we observe today.
Before the Covid-19 crisis hit the working class was already reeling from mass unemployment and an avalanche of retrenchments in mining, retail, and the media.
Some economists think that the Covid-19 crisis will cost us another million jobs.
The immediate focus from progressives during the crisis has been on police brutality, evictions, the rapidly growing food crisis and the rapid normalisation of xenophobia, with Tito Mboweni being the latest to trod the right-wing populist path first worn by Donald Trump.
But when the lockdown is finally lifted it may well be mass unemployment that becomes the defining crisis of our time.
The recent expansion in welfare might blunt some of the more extreme edges of the mass impoverishment that will follow mass unemployment as surely as night follows day.
But with the growing power of the right in the ANC, and in public discourse generally, an expansion of the welfare system may not prove to be a sustainable policy option.
The pressures for austerity may overwhelm pressing social concerns.
If this happens it’s hard to see that the state will be able to continue to sustain popular consent for its authority without keeping the police and perhaps the army on the streets.
What, we might ask, does May Day mean under these bleak circumstances?
May Day has its roots in the woodland cultures that grew up in the vast forests of ancient Europe. It was a spring festival, celebrating the bounty of nature.
With the rise of capitalism, elites, desperate to impose a "proper work discipline" on the people, sought to repress the festival. It was in this repression that it began to be identified as a workers’ holiday.
On 1 May 1886 workers across the United States struck to demand an eight-hour working day.
In Chicago striking workers were attacked, someone responded with a bomb and a number of workers and police officers were killed in the ensuing chaos.
In 1889 the Second International, an organisation of socialist parties, adopted a resolution calling for "a great international demonstration" on a single date so workers everywhere could demand the eight-hour work day.
The following year, on 1 May workers organised huge demonstrations in Europe and the United States and May Day had become workers’ day.
It was first celebrated in South Africa in 1895.
As the celebration grew workers would fill major urban centres on May Day as Jewish leaders, such as AZ Berman, and their Muslim counterparts, such as Abdullah Abdurahman, led workers arm in arm with African leaders such as Clements Kadalie and John Gomas.
For workers, colour, religion and creed meant nothing, they were brothers in struggle; they had nothing to lose but their chains.
The greatest theme linking the global struggle to be able to celebrate May Day as a workers’ holiday was the demand for an eight-hour day - eight hours for rest, eight for work and eight of free time.
This demand was eventually won in many countries, but often at cost and with much blood.
Workers and workers’ parties came to power in many countries following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
This was followed by Mao’s revolution in China and Fidel Castro”s triumph over the American backed dictator Batista. There were successes and failures, victories and disappointments, new challenges and questions.
In South Africa May Day was turned into Workers’ Day by popular struggle.
In 1982 workers across all the major unions had struck together on the day of the funeral of trade union leader Neil Aggett, who had died in police custody.
Cosatu was formed in 1985. The following year, on the centenary of the Haymarket Massacre, Cosatu called for a national one-day strike on May Day.
From then on May Day was observed each year by millions of workers before being made an official holiday when apartheid came to an end.
After apartheid many workers honed a dual consciousness - a workers' consciousness that made them proud of being workers who strive for a better life through struggles, and a nationalist consciousness that made them key voters for the ANC.
The failure to address this dual consciousness would lead the organised working class into a profound crisis during the years of Zuma’s kleptocracy.
Cosatu’s uncritical support for Zuma under the leader of S’dumo Dlamini, a notoriously spineless and unprincipled opportunist, saw Amcu capture the support of most mine workers in the wake of the Marikana Massacre in 2012.
Numsa, the largest and most militant union in the country, was expelled from Cosatu in 2014 after it refused to temper its strident criticism of Zuma.
We can count the end of the unity of the organised working class amongst the many other forms of destruction resulting from the Zuma years.
Numsa would go in to form its own federation, Saftu, and to capture the support of industrial workers in new sectors, such as aviation.
It would also, importantly, form an alliance with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the largest and best organised social movement to have emerged after apartheid, in an attempt to return to the social movement unionism that had shaped the labour movement in the 1980s.
The alliance between Abahlali, which has a majority of women members and includes many people working in the informal economy and as domestic workers, and Numsa, a male dominated union with members largely in the industrial sector, is potentially significant.
However, the relentless wave of retrenchments sweeping through the economy has put all the industrial unions, including Numsa, on the backfoot.
Cosatu now largely represents government workers, but if Mboweni gets his way, and the ANC imposes a structural adjustment programme, government workers will soon start to face retrenchments too.
The tension between Cosatu and Saftu declined significantly once Zuma was out of office, and if both federations are facing mass retrenchments they may well see a need to begin working together again.
In 1986 the industrial working class numbered in the millions and its unions wielded considerable power.
Things are very different now. If the union movement is to regain the power that it wielded in the 1980s it will have to do more than find a way for government and industrial workers to find common ground.
These days unionised workers are often older.
There is a vast population of young people who have never been in formal employment and, in many cases, will never find a formal job. Talk of "decent jobs" has been nothing but a cruel fantasy.
The reality is that mass unemployment is a structural feature of our neo-colonial economy, an economy that makes ANC leaders and their families very wealthy. Unions will have to find a way to join up with the unemployed if they are to be able to drive progressive change from below.
The alliance that Numsa has forged with Abahlali baseMjondolo is a good start, but there is a long way to go.
The bulk of the unemployed are not formally organised and until this barrier to unity between the working class and the poor is overcome unions will not be able to have either the political power or moral authority that they once did.
Organising the unorganised is critical.
The question is whether or not unions, always on the back foot as the bulk of their resources and energies go into opposing retrenchments, have the resilience and capacity to simultaneously deal with relentless retrenchments and reach out to unorganised millions who languish outside of the formal economy?
Time will tell. But the mood on this May Day will certainly be sombre.
- Imraan Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation