July 2014

After 5-Month Platinum Strike, 200,000+ NUMSA Members Walk Out

Worker Revolt Continues to
Shake South African Capitalism

Members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) in Durban on July 1, first day of the national strike, point to non-striking construction workers demanding they join the walkout.  (Photo: Rogan Ward/Reuters)

Victory to the Metal Workers Strike!

JULY 5 – South African bosses are worried. Business Day (3 July) headlines, “‘Worker revolt’ Aggravating Most Difficult Economic Time Since 2009.” The online news site Daily Maverick frets, “South Africa may well be the strike capital of the world.” The five-month platinum miners strike, the longest in the country’s history, was settled on June 23. Although failing to achieve the demand of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) for a monthly wage of 12,500 rand (a little under US$1,200), the base pay of the lowest-paid miners was raised from around 5,000 to 8,000 rand – a 60% increase over three years.

Then on July 1, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) launched an indefinite strike involving more than 220,000 workers in the engineering and metals sector, ushered in by massive marches by its membership across the country. The strike hit producers of iron, steel, durable consumer goods and plastics. By July 4, General Motors had to shut down its Port Elizabeth auto assembly plant due to parts shortages. The head of the employers’ Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa estimated the NUMSA strike was costing the industry US$30 million a day.

Following reelection of African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma as president, the back-to-back AMCU and NUMSA strikes, which could spread to the gold mining sector, set the stage for another confrontation between workers and South Africa’s black capitalist regime. The shock waves of the August 2012 Marikana massacre continue to reverberate in the economic powerhouse of Africa. But a decisive victory will require a break with the ruling Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, the sellout Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the anti-communist South African Communist Party (SACP) and rejection of the Stalinst/social-democratic program of “two-stage” revolution in order to fight for socialist revolution.

The platinum strike had already shaken the neo-apartheid regime (see “Elections and Miners Strike: South African Popular Front in Crisis,” The Internationalist No. 37, May-June 2014). The miners walked out for 12,500 rand, the demand of the 2012 strike, for which 36 strikers were shot down in cold blood by the police at Marikana. The final settlement was a limited but real victory for the miners. The bosses’ media try to minimize it by calculating how much strikers lost during five months without pay. But for the miners what was key was that the companies were not able to starve them into submission, they resisted police repression and won a big raise.

Worker at Lonmin platinum mine in Rustenburg, South Africa returns after five-month strike in which determined strikers won substantial raise, faced down police repression and beat attempts to starve them out.  (Photo: EPA)

Yet mine workers will still be mired in abject poverty, living in tin shacks while managers wheel around in their BMWs. The claims that replacing the formal structures of white supremacy known as apartheid would bring freedom for the downtrodden South African non-white masses have been shown to be hollow. Now some liberals are talking about a switch from a “low-wage, high-employment” mining industry to a “high-wage, low-employment” model (Business Day, 18 June). Nonsense. They may automate the mines, but South African capitalism was built on the bedrock of superexploitation of black labor and that will not change under neo-apartheid.

The platinum strike went up against the ANC government, and had to contend with scabbing by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Even so, the historic 12,500-rand wage demand against the hugely profitable Lonmin, Amplats and Implats mining companies could have been won – but the miners couldn’t do it alone. As we wrote last April, “There should have been, and should be today, a mobilization of all of South African labor to defend the miners with solidarity strike action to bring South Africa to a standstill in support of the platinum strike.” NUMSA workers in the platinum refineries could have continued their strike until the miners won.

The point was noted by a Witwatersrand University researcher, Gavin Capps, quoted by the liberal Mail & Guardian (20 June) saying that the union’s initial demand “could have been won with co-ordinated action from another sector. If there had been co-ordination with refinery workers, for example, and with transport workers who would have simply refused to transport the stockpiles, there would have been a tighter squeeze on production.” But this was blocked by mutual suspicion between the NUMSA and AMCU tops while “the National Council of Trade Unions, to which Amcu is affiliated, folded its arms as Amcu slugged it out in Rustenburg.”

Even as the COSATU/NUM labor fakers and SACP fake communists back the Zuma government to the hilt as the price for their reserved seats on the neo-apartheid “gravy train,” and despite bureaucratic tensions among the more militant unions, with metal workers walking out on the heels of the miners strike, the capitalists are reacting like they were hit by a one-two punch. “There will be no settlement whatsoever unless a double-digit increase is achieved,” said NUMSA president Andrew Chirwa on June 26. Although the leadership scaled back its demands, from 20% to 15% to 12%, union marchers in Johannesburg are insisting on at least 15%.

NUMSA also decided to launch a series of pickets and marches on July 2 over its deadlocked wage negotiations with the power utility Eskom, where it is likewise demanding 12%. Strikes against this state-owned electricity firm are banned under South Africa’s anti-labor “essential services” law. NUMSA represents only a quarter of the 40,000 Eskom workers, but a few pickets at the Medupi power station under construction in Limpopo province resulted in many contract workers not showing up (The Citizen, 4 July). Cops drove off the pickets at the entrance with potentially lethal rubber bullets. The next act in this drama could be bloody.

The ANC government has of course denounced the metalworkers, but despite backstabbing by COSATU bureaucrats, the strike has received verbal support from a number of federations. Meanwhile, the bourgeois press screeches that Moody's, the credit rating firm, may downgrade South African government bonds to “junk” status. At a July 1 rally in Port Elizabeth, NUMSA treasurer Mphumzi Maqungo replied to “economic analysts arguing that this strike is politically motivated and will hit the economy hardest. We want to tell them that they must go to hell” (The Herald, 2 July).

While the NUMSA strike is fully justified, it is nonetheless very political. In addition to the wage demand, NUMSA is calling for a ban on labor brokers (the parasites who supply temporary contract workers who receive a pittance far below the poverty wages regular workers receive) and a ban on hiring under the Employment Tax Incentive Act (a scheme to subsidize capitalists if they hire youth, also with poor wages and no rights). COSATU has begged its “allies” in the bourgeois government to ban labor brokering, to no avail. (Not coincidentally the profiteers from this modern-day slave trade include the son of President Zuma.)

In December 2013, NUMSA broke with the Tripartite Alliance, and refused to back the ANC in the May elections. It talks of socialism and calls for building some kind of “workers party.” But the NUMSA memorandum announcing the strike, while citing the crises of capitalism, deplores the “shameful” poverty wages “in our democracy” and demands “that government stops pursuing neo-liberal policies.” It also asserts that “we have a struggle to engage both business and capital” to “defend the current capability of our manufacturing sector.” Thus in practice, its policy amounts to a hopeless quest to pressure capital into behaving in a “comradely” way.

Curiously, the South African business weekly Financial Mail (20 June) recently published a series of articles on “participative capitalism” including an editorial, featuring a photo of NUMSA general secretary Irvin Jim, titled “Can Comrade Capitalism Work?” As any Marxist could tell you, the answer is a flat “no.” Even in the neo-apartheid never-never land, where the South African Communist Party staffs the bourgeois state and runs the police/intelligence apparatus, all the talk of “stakeholder,” “responsible” and “conscious” capitalism won’t amount to a hill of beans because the very essence of capitalism is exploitation.

As Lenin remarked about the “economist” social democrats of his day who talked of “lending the economic struggle itself a political character,” such simple trade unionism cannot take the workers’ struggle forward to revolution. Yet the excruciating situation of the South African proletariat cries out for revolutionary, class-struggle politics. To win support from the oppressed masses of township residents, contract workers and unemployed youth that the government appeals to with its demagogic anti-labor laws, NUMSA should fight for massive hiring for full-time jobs through a drastic reduction of the workweek with no loss in pay, with pay adjusted for inflation (a sliding scale of wages and hours).

Particularly after Marikana, it should be clear to class-conscious workers that organizing “unions” of police – the armed fist of capital – such as POPCRU is a ticket for disaster. A class-struggle leadership of labor would organize workers defense guards to block scabs and cop attacks. And in the face of threats of retrenchments (layoffs) and closures of plants and mines, rather than simply asking to see the capitalists’ “financials,” as does the NUMSA strike memorandum, it would fight to impose workers control of their enterprises. Such demands from Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program would be a bridge from today’s struggles to the fight for socialist revolution.

Unlike the social democrats of the Democratic Socialist Movement and its Workers and Socialist Party, who envisage the NUMSA obliging COSATU to call a nice, peaceful general (protest) strike for a wage hike and a living minimum wage – with nationalization of the metal industry tacked on at the end as left cover – authentic Trotskyists emphasize that a revolutionary struggle for power would be posed by a real general strike. What’s urgently needed in South Africa today to free the workers and urban and rural poor from neo-apartheid slavery is above all building a revolutionary workers party on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, to fight for a black-centered workers government in a socialist federation of Africa. ■