INTRODUCTION

In post-apartheid South Africa, high youth unemployment is a national emergency. Young people are more subject to working poverty and are inclined to lose their jobs during crises. In South Africa, young people struggle to find employment, and they face the greatest risk of losing employment during a pandemic (Espi, Leibbrandt and Rancchod 2021). As South Africa headed to its sixth national democratic elections in May 2019, the key political parties contesting the election promised that youth unemployment would be dealt with, and many parties pledged to create more jobs. The South African government has struggled to put the unemployed into jobs, most especially the youth.

Globally youth unemployment is receiving more attention as young people's engagement in the labour market is declining. The International Labour Organization (ILO 2020) estimates that currently there are 429 million young workers globally. However, between 1999 and 2019, the total number of youth in the labour force had decreased from 568 million to 497 million; presently the global youth unemployment rate is 13.6 per cent. It is estimated that a fifth of young people globally are not gaining labour market experience, earning an income from working, or improving their education and skills. They are not in employment, education or training (NEET). Young workers also face high rates of poverty and are found in non-standard, informal and less secure types of employment (ILO 2020). Many young people in developing economies commence their labour market attachment as unpaid workers contributing to family work before moving on to work on their own. In the era of work becoming increasingly flexible and precarious, coupled with rapid technological change in the workplace, the predicted rise in economic inequality, insecure forms of employment and inadequate job opportunities has the potential to negatively impact the well-being of future generations. The unemployment rate in the Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – was estimated at 6.7 per cent in 2020. About 28.4 per cent of the youth labour force was underutilised, which means that they were either unemployed or in the potential labour force (ILO 2020). The key factor in establishing who to count as unemployed is that the person has to be actively looking for employment and so they are part of the potential labour force.

THE STATE OF LABOUR, THE STATE OF LABOUR STUDIES

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Durban strikes, a strike wave that set in motion unprecedented dynamism in the South African labour movement after more than a decade of trade union decline. Because of apartheid legislation that curtailed union activities for black workers, as well as the persecution of union activists, trade unions were either incorporated into the government system of racialised collective bargaining (mostly through unions representing white workers), or had collapsed as formal organisations in the country and were forced to operate from exile. The strike wave of 1973 was a turning point in terms of workplace relations and the labour movement; the dynamism that followed eventually presented a significant challenge to the apartheid system as a whole when unions from the mining and manufacturing sectors merged to form the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985. Ironically, labour law reforms that were intended to incorporate and tame the emerging militant unions opened up new spaces for organising; by the time the apartheid state wanted to roll back some of these laws, organised labour had become so strong that the state was forced to retreat (Friedman 1987; Baskin 1991).

Now, fifty years after this turning point, the dynamism of yore tends to be found in nostalgic reflections of the past rather than innovations in the present. To be sure, in so far as organised labour in South Africa is concerned, the past decade has been characterised by major disruptions in the order of things. As the country's dominant labour federation, Cosatu lost a large proportion of its manufacturing base when its metal union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), left to form a rival federation, namely the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu). In addition to this setback for worker unity and Cosatu's principle of ‘one country, one federation’, individual trade unions across the spectrum faced threats of deregistration. The Registrar of Labour started to take more seriously the Department of Labour's oversight of trade union financial governance and reporting after years during which labour factionalism had negatively impacted bureaucratic independence.

INTRODUCTION

The severe restrictions placed on all but essential types of economic activity during South Africa's first lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 exposed not only the frail forms of livelihood tactics adopted by so many South Africans, but also revealed many issues that South African trade unions had not faced up to previously. Those who work in retail, as well as teachers, nurses and doctors faced the crisis head-on, delivering essential services during the Covid- 19 crisis. Workers in jobs that permitted them to work from home, such as professionals and managers, were more fortunate than others during the lockdowns. However, workers in elementary occupations and plant and machine operations, as well as those in occupations such as community, social and personal services, mineworkers, private households and manufacturing could not work remotely ( Benhura and Magejo 2021). Trade union members and their trade unions faced many challenges during the Covid-19 crisis, but even those on opposing sides of the ideological spectrum have taken the opportunity to forge working- class unity as they have found common ground to respond collectively, which is what this chapter focuses on.

THE IMPACT OF THE NATIONAL LOCKDOWN IN SOUTH AFRICA

The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, declared a State of Disaster on 15 March 2020, and the country went into lockdown at midnight on 26 March 2020. The initial lockdown lasted 35 days at alert level five, which was the most restrictive phase. The national lockdown affected economic activity, and some people were threatened with retrenchment or lost their jobs and their income. The result was that they, together with their households, went without food. These were workers who were vulnerable to job loss as they could not work from their homes or they were in low-skill occupations, representing roughly 10.5 million workers or 63 per cent of the workforce. Workers in low-wage sectors such as hospitality and entertainment, catering, construction, the informal economy and domestic work were particularly affected by the lockdown. They had no option but to stay at home. Many did not get paid during the lockdown, or their salaries were cut.

Utilising data from the Quarterly Labour Force Surveys, it is estimated that in 2020, 26.7 per cent or 4.5 million workers in employment prior to the lockdown were employed in essential industries or occupations (Kerr and Thornton 2020).

INTRODUCTION

The chapters collected in this volume raise new topics for South African labour studies, but they also point to the need to return to past debates. In this concluding chapter, we provide an overview and highlight some of these new foci and how they relate to more established (and at times forgotten) debates. We are interested in challenges posed by this to both the labour movement and to South African labour studies more generally. We introduced the volume with an appreciation of the challenge posed to South African workers and the labour movement by the Covid-19 pandemic. All of this happened in the context of a fragmented labour movement, described by labour scholars and in the popular media as being weak and lacking direction. Not surprisingly, both the virus and the lockdown that was intended to slow its spread had major negative impacts. Like the rest of the world, we have experienced the shock of family, friends and colleagues dying because of the pandemic, of fellow workers losing their jobs and livelihoods, as well as the tragic death of a number of prominent union leaders, including the general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers. But we also argued that the pandemic, probably ironically so, posed challenges to the labour movement that focused the minds of members and leaders alike, and led to the emergence of renewed interest in working-class unity. Old and new enemies jointly participated in some of the campaigns that challenged government's response to the pandemic. All of this happened while South Africans, in lockdown mode, were following the drama on television and other media platforms around state capture in the form of the Zondo Commission of Enquiry.

Much of the research for the chapters in this volume started before the Covid-19 pandemic, and not all the chapters deal directly with this topic and its fallout. Nevertheless, they all highlight in some way that a major international health crisis, which also precipitated an economic crisis, tended to be felt along the contours of existing fault lines. A crisis tends to focus our attention on questions that have lurked in the background. So we start our discussion here with the chapter preceding this one, where Christine Bischoff clearly illustrates this point about fault lines. As could be expected, vulnerable workers in vulnerable sectors were affected more severely than others.

INTRODUCTION

Members of Cosatu unions in our survey earned an average monthly income of R12 361.26, ranging from an individual who earned R45 000 a month to one who earned just R1 086. Of the entire sample, 25 per cent earned less than R6 800 per month and half earned less than R11 000 per month. There were also differences between Cosatu members who were members of public sector unions (average monthly income R14 108.58) and private sector unions (average monthly income R10 760.92). The households of more than 80 per cent of these union members were entirely dependent on wages for household incomes, with only 4.4 per cent reporting receiving child-care grants and fewer than 1 per cent receiving either old-age or disability grants. These wages supported on average 4.26 other household members, including children, as dependents (members of private sector unions supported more household members, an average of 4.39 dependents, whereas members of public sector unions supported an average of 4.05 dependents).

These figures illustrate the income diversity among members of trade unions historically affiliated to Cosatu. In an opinion piece in the Mail & Guardian, Loane Sharp (2014), an economist associated with the Free Market Foundation, argued that a ‘class war’ was behind the divisions in Cosatu that led to the expulsion of Numsa:

In this reading of the situation, Numsa members have a more radical working-class approach, whereas Cosatu, dominated by public sector unions, would have more conservative – or possibly liberal – values based on their interests rooted in the experience of class mobility.

There are clearly a number of limitations to this analysis which relates a complex set of issues to a distinction between a working class and a middle class. First, the alignment of the trade unions in the conflict contradicts the argument.

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.