[DEBATE] : SATAWU members disrupt May Day celebration in Cape Town

[Peter van Heusden]

I wasn't personally there (sick, sick child, etc), but I got the
following report from Indymedia comrades who were at the Good Hope Centre:

COSATU's May Day celebration at the Good Hope Centre in Cape Town was
brought to a halt today by SATAWU members - apparently security guards
who are currently out on strike. The disruption started when workers
came down from the grandstands and brought an end to the cultural
programme organised for the day, claiming that they had nothing to
celebrate. Some workers then threw papers at the stage and tried to
seize the microphones, breaking audio equipment in the process. SATAWU
leaders tried to convince their members to allow the programme to
continue, but after much discussion, the programme was abandoned. The
striking workers then marched out of the Good Hope Centre, where they
were met by police. An initial proposal to march to Parliament was
abandoned because Parliament was closed, and police lines eventually
forced the marchers to make their way to the train station and onto
trains home.

Tony Ehrenreich, the provincial secretary of COSATU, blamed the
disruption on young workers, but the question remains - why did they
rise up against their own leaders' programme? Today's programme involved
cultural events, film showings as well as input from numerous NGOs -
AIDC, Women on Farms, TAC, Earthlife Africa, etc. In other words, a much
broader spectrum than simply COSATU speakers, and for once not simply
self-congratulatory speakers from the Alliance. The SATAWU members'
grievances seem to be related to a perceived lack of support from COSATU
for the security guards' strike. In recent years COSATU May Day events
have been more like picnics than part of a workers' struggle, and this
seems to have been one problem. Another problem - and one exposed by the
security guards strike in various ways - has been the inability of
COSATU and its unions to relate to an industry which is highly
fragmented (4500 security companies registered in 2004, 33 unions in the
sector), highly distributed (with guards working for the same company
spread across numerous workplaces), institutionalised racism (blacks
guards, white managers, many managers having Apartheid era police
experience, etc) etc etc. This is also a incredibly fast-growing
industry, with 500 000 security guards in 2004 (source: BBC), up from
160 000 in 1994 (who worked for 2600 companies - source Institute for
Security Studies), which means that there hasn't been a long time to
build up a "union culture" in the industry. In any case, the Department
of Labour counts the security industry at 100 000 workers (not sure why
their figure is so low compared to the other figures, of which somewhere
between 20 and 35 000 are SATAWU members (DoL claims 20 300 members, and
SATAWU claims that it has 34 370 members - if true, that's a massive
growth in membership), and less that 10 000 belong to the other unions.

In other words, the security guards pose a challenge to COSATU - a
challenge to its image of itself, of how it views workers, workplaces
and struggle. That challenge was put rather vociferously at the Good
Hope Centre today, and it would be a mistake of historic proportions to
write it off as simply 'undisciplined members'.

Anyway, pics & story will be on Indymedia South Africa
http://sa.indymedia.org tomorrow or so.

Peter