WORKERS, HOUSEHOLDS AND SOUTH AFRICA'S SOCIO-ECONOMIC ORDER

This chapter attempts to examine critically the view of Cosatu workers as a labour aristocracy or a ‘self-interested’ elite. It does so by examining wage data gathered from members of Cosatu affiliates in the fifth of a series of surveys of Cosatu membership which have been conducted since 1994, and it looks at the wage data through a number of other variables derived from questions in the 2014 survey of membership.

The notion of Cosatu members as a labour aristocracy can be related to the growing divisions in the labour market between permanent and temporary workers and high-income and low-income earners (see Forslund and Reddy 2015: 84–88). Our data suggests that Cosatu does not organise many temporary workers but it does organise workers who earn low wages. Importantly, those who support the labour aristocracy thesis often use labour market data as applied to individuals. In this chapter we take seriously the point that trade union members support dependents on their wages. Pnina Werbner's (2010) use of the notion of a ‘marginal labour elite’ provides a far more useful way of understanding Cosatu's membership. Werbner's ‘marginal labour elite’ locates trade union members outside of the workplace and in relation to their social reality by focusing specifically on their role in the household as a wage earner.

Twenty years into democracy, South African society is still marked by immense socio-economic problems such as chronic levels of unemployment and incessant levels of poverty and inequality. The number and intensity of strikes have increased in private and public sector workplaces. Globally, in the phase of informationtechnology- led capitalism, the number of workers employed as permanent workers is decreasing as the number employed as temporary, casual or part-time workers is increasing.

This trend is explained by Jan Theron's (2010) description of the interrelated processes of ‘informalisation from above’ and ‘informalisation from below’. Whereas ‘informalisation from below’ refers to those who engage in survivalist activities or self-employment, ‘informalisation from above’ is a response to employers’ efforts to restructure workplaces by externalising labour. This process fragments and differentiates the workforce by creating a layer of workers who, despite being located in the formal workplace, find themselves on the outside of labour legislation and collective bargaining because their employer, the service provider, determines their working conditions and is not legally bound to an employment relationship with the core business.

INTRODUCTION

At times, the process of conducting fieldwork can be as revealing as the analysis of the data itself. Our experience of conducting the 2014 Taking Democracy Seriously workers’ survey, the fifth of its kind, is an example of such a moment. Over a period of twenty years, members of our teams have been visiting the same factories, mines and workshops in order to interview Cosatu members. In the process we have seen some factories close down and others restructured through various kinds of outsourcing arrangements, especially after trade liberalisation in the mid-1990s. This has had a profound impact on trade unions, especially since they often lose members to unemployment or vulnerable positions in the casualised labour market. In spite of this, insofar as trade unions themselves and the federations they are affiliated to are concerned, the organising landscape itself has remained stable for roughly twenty years.

However, in conducting the 2014 survey we encountered a range of new research challenges related to this seismic rupture in the country's trade union dispensation. It was the first time we were unable to get formal approval from the federation. Instead, we had to rely on cooperation from affiliates. It was also the first time we encountered real rivalry at the workplace between trade unions from the same federation. In some cases we would go to factories previously organised by one Cosatu affiliate, only to encounter the leadership of a rival union from the same federation representing workers. We also conducted our fieldwork during the longest mining strike in South African history, led by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), a union that is not affiliated to Cosatu. In Rustenburg we even received death threats in the course of attempts to interview mineworkers for the survey, raising new ethical challenges not encountered before. In short, we conducted the research in a highly charged environment.

Some of the challenges we have faced are not entirely new. Since 2008, with the launch of the Congress of the People (Cope) as a party split off from the ANC, the Taking Democracy Seriously research teams have noted how the political climate has affected the research process (Bischoff and Tshoaedi 2012; Buhlungu 2006). In 2014 this was no different, but the impact was more profound and presented us with unusual research challenges that determined how we negotiated access to the workplaces.