The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) is sulking. It has taken a decision not to campaign for the ANC in the upcoming local elections, by withholding its material and physical resources.
This is either due to the impasse with the government over the 2018 public sector wage deal, or because it does not have the money to do so — the reasons differ, depending on which national leader of the union is speaking.
The union, Cosatu’s largest affiliate, pushed hard at the last central executive committee (CEC) meeting for this decision to extend to the entire labour federation, but it faced fierce pushback from other unions and in the end took a decision to shift the matter to a separate meeting.
A special Cosatu CEC meeting is planned for April, where the federation will decide on its approach towards the ANC in the elections.
We have been here before, many times — labour’s election threat has grown stale and empty, and significantly it is no longer an untested experiment.
Cosatu’s former largest affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), dipped its toes into electoral waters and failed spectacularly.
Also, while Nehawu may want Cosatu to flex its muscle and pull a dramatic stunt to get the ANC’s attention, the truth is the labour federation is no longer in any shape to make such a dramatic move.
Cosatu is a shadow of its former self. After Numsa’s departure — expelled from the federation precisely because it took a decision to pull electoral support from the ANC and push Cosatu to withdraw from the alliance — it has come to be dominated by public sector unions.
Former ANC secretary-general and current chair Gwede Mantashe warned Cosatu in 2015 that if public sector unions were to dominate, it would evolve into a “yellow federation”.
Cosatu unions are putting out fires on all fronts — as the jobs bloodbath continues, union membership is fast diminishing and unions have had to curb their demands and expectations amid a harsh economic climate and under lockdown restrictions.
Even the ever-radical Numsa agreed to forgo wage increases in the metals and engineering sector to save jobs in 2020, extending its previous agreement for an extra year.
Government workers have not been spared — the public sector wage impasse over the 2018 deal is but one example.
The SA Municipal Workers’ Union, for example, told the CEC that workers at municipal level were being dismissed en masse and that some were not even being paid by broke municipalities.
State-owned companies are set to retrench workers, with the Communication Workers’ Union on a collision course with the SABC. Union competition is intensifying as jobs dwindle.
Unionists have weighed up the political alternatives outside the ANC and have come up with rather slim pickings — they view the DA as racist and neoliberal, and the EFF as reactionary.
The other option is to push the SACP towards contesting future polls — another unlikely scenario, given that the party’s leaders are mostly deployed as ministers.
This leads to the most crucial reason Cosatu would rather continue to tough it out inside the alliance — Numsa’s experiment with a socialist worker party was a disaster.
There is every chance that if the SACP contested elections — even if it had the spine — it would suffer a similar fate.
Nehawu is hoping to harness the support of public service workers who are unhappy with the ANC-led government, and gain some members out of this to prop up its leaders, who are up for re-election later this year.
Its noise around support for the ANC in the upcoming local polls can simply be chalked up to a dramatic re-election campaign for its own leaders.