The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), a major force of organised workers in South Africa’s mining industry, might lose its registration status if it does not convene a proper national elective congress in 2019. The Registrar of Labour Relations recently published a notice to this effect in a government gazette.
AMCU held its most recent elective congress in January 2011, preceded by similar congresses in 2007 and 2004. Its Special National Congress of September 2013 did not focus on electing a new leadership. It should have had such a congress in 2018, eventually postponed to May 2019 but this one also failed to take place. Yet the constitution of AMCU dictates that elective congresses must take place at 5 yearly intervals and that its membership must be notified of such a congress no less than six months before it takes place (clause 22.3.3 of AMCU’s constitution). Based on these facts and legal technicalities, the officialdom of the union is violating the union’s constitution, thus creating a pretext for the Registrar’s intervention into how AMCU operates. The Registrar has clearly lost trust in prominent AMCU leaders and questioned the sincerity of the union’s National Executive Committee response letter (dated 3 April 2019) in which it promises to have the long-overdue congress in September 2019.
Solidarity with AMCU gathered momentum in parallel with opposition to the Registrar, centred on what some have called ‘politically-motivated interference into unions not aligned to the governing ANC’. Opposing the Registrar’s intervention into the internal affairs of an organisation of and for workers, however, is not enough. For this fiasco also raises a fundamental political question: should the Registrar (a bourgeois state agency), union bureaucrats or workers determine how trade unions operate?
When a trade union registers itself in terms of the Labour Relations Act, it agrees to defend the interests of its members within the boundaries of the law and the regulatory regime this law imposes on trade unions. With registration comes a police agent such as the Registrar; its function is hardwired into the Labour Relations Act. This confronts the trade union with a dilemma of how it relates to the state. It inevitably draws the trade union into politics and exposes the popular myth of ‘no politics in the trade unions’ for what it is worth. Apolitical trade unionism is an absurdity!
AMCU’s battle against deregistration has unmasked, once again, what is happening inside it and other unions. Through its prominence in the 2012 platinum belt strike, which culminated in the Marikana massacre, it grew into the majority union in the platinum and coal mining sectors. In the gold mines, it is the second largest body of unionised workers behind the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). AMCU’s current membership is in the order of 250,000 workers.
In the context of the relative stagnation of trade union membership in South Africa, AMCU’s numerical growth is inspiring and calls into question obituaries of this country’s trade union movement. Its officialdom, however, has fallen victim to a strain of business unionism, a pernicious ideology that usually poisons working class organisations through self-seeking bureaucrats. Business unionists implant and nurture the principles of capitalist organisational practices and thinking inside trade unions. This insidious ideology is pervasive in capitalist societies and its logic is to strangle the progressive self-organisation of workers. Many union leaders succumb to it unknowingly. On the surface, in name and rituals, it is still a trade union. But without substantive content that advances workers’ economic and socio-political interests.
AMCU leaders have entangled themselves in growing scandals that have plunged the union into one crisis after another. One of many cases turns around financial mismanagement and another on its association with ‘rival’ trade union federations. Alleged irregularities around the control over workers’ retirement savings are rife. In 2016, the union set up the Igula Umbrella Provident Fund, ostensibly to pay retirees their savings promptly. Squabbles among union bureaucrats, self-appointed trustees of the Igula fund, have effectively rendered the trust dysfunctional. The value of the Igula fund stands at R7 billion yet it has not submitted six-monthly financial statements to the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA). Is the Igula provident fund not another shady scheme, like trade union investment companies, for bureaucratic self-enrichment at the expense of workers?
After its launch in 2002, AMCU affiliated to the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), a federation originally aligned with black consciousness politics of the 1970s and 1980s. AMCU instantly became the largest NACTU affiliate by membership size. With this step, AMCU revealed more than its overt commitment to unity of unionised workers. For its decision to join forces under the NACTU umbrella has meant not affiliating to rival federations like the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the Confederation of South African Workers’ Unions (CONSAWU), the Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA) or the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU). This decision on which federation to join has the overtones of ideological motives, a common trigger for splits and divisions among South Africa’s weakened but undefeated trade union movement.
Road Ahead For AMCU
Festering tensions between the bureaucracy of the federation and its dominant affiliate grew more acute with the passage of time and escalating socio-political conflicts engulfing them. How the AMCU officialdom handled these tensions revealed profound inconsistencies and conflicts between their rhetoric and actions. In the 2014 national parliamentary elections, for instance, NACTU misled their affiliates into a campaign to vote for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) – copying COSATU’s disastrous ’vote ANC’ routine. AMCU’s leaders, on the other hand, upheld the nonsense of apolitical trade unionism, a falsehood that politically disarms the working class who urgently needs its own principled political alternative to these ideologically bankrupt parties.
As NACTU was heading towards its elective conference in 2017, all the signs highlighted that the tensions with its smug affiliate had reached breaking point. AMCU had lost its status as an affiliate-in-good standing because it was not up to date with its mandatory dues to the federal body. Its pre-2016 debt in affiliation fees relegated AMCU to observer status at the conference, a ruling vehemently rejected by its leaders. The federation and its affiliate traded accusations in a brutal war of words. The collapse of this chaotic conference was the last act in AMCU’s dramatic split from NACTU.
The failure of AMCU bureaucrats to convene national elective congresses for more than 8 years – the spark to its clash with the Registrar of Labour Relations – is a symptom of the mess engulfing trade unions. Without a doubt, these national elective congresses do more than the democratic renewal of the union’s leadership. What the hard-earned lessons of the labour movement teach us is that the substance of every mass workers’ assembly is as important as regularly convening them to combat the degeneration of the trade unions. Restricting these congresses to petty trade union technicalities and endorsing bureaucratic populists goes against the interests of workers. Congresses that serve the interests of workers ought to be processes and assemblies that involve all its dues-paying members directly in debates and decisions about their unions. It must strengthen rank-and-file democracy through concrete action instead of sideshows to parade celebrity bureaucrats. Bolstering the contributions of unions to the anti-capitalist political struggle of all exploited and oppressed people (including non-unionised and jobless workers) should be a priority of such assemblies.