Link workers and residents: Prof Lucien van der Walt, NALSU director, addresses SAMWU conference

Link workers and residents: Prof Lucien van der Walt, NALSU director, addresses SAMWU conference

Professor Lucien van der Walt, Director of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University, was an invited speaker at the South African Municipal Workers Union’s (SAMWU’s) National Bargaining Council Conference held 15-16 March 2021. He spoke on “Defense and Strengthening of Collective Bargaining in the Context of Municipal and Working-Class Crisis,” following union president Nelson Mokgotho’s opening address. 

Lucien noted the adversarial bargaining climate. This includes recent labour law amendments and court judgements, but fundamentally its about the larger capitalist economic crisis,  and the class nature of the corrupt, fragmented state.

Austerity is driving protests and reflects a state edging to bankruptcy, rather than simply bad policy or bad apples.  It is essential to defend collective bargaining, but important to reframe it beyond a narrow wage focus to a broader vision of change. At least R150 billion is lost annually to corruption and wasteful expenditure in state budgets; only one in ten municipalities got a clean audit in the 2017/2018 financial year. There have been thousands of protests against wretched living conditions, and collapsing, inadequate power, sanitation and water grids. Rising residents’ associations now combine protests and court cases: the Unemployed Peoples Movement (UPM), for example, secured a High Court order dissolving Makana municipality in 2019, while another court gave the Kgetlengrivier residents’ association direct control over key municipal services in 2020.

Unions like SAMWU, organising 160,000 workers in municipalities and water boards, need to rebuild workers’ control, unlock union investments for organising, campaign against outsourcing and the EPWP system, and drive better service delivery, acting as watchdogs against corruption. It is important to defend whistleblowers, and systematically link up with residents, avoiding methods of struggle that alienate them. Lucien concluded that we need to build independent, people-driven challenges and self-managed alternatives to the current mess.

This engagement builds on NALSU’s history of working with SAMWU, the largest municipal workers union in southern Africa. SAMWU’s two-day congress was held under the banner of “Advancing and Defending our Gains towards a Comprehensive Social Security.”