FROM AMATEURISM TO PROFESSIONALISM

NUM is a strong union not only because it has at least one full-time elected official in each structure from branch to national (in addition to many other part-time elected officials and some full-time officials at shaft level), but also because it rests on numerous and competent staff. The importance of staff in NUM is illustrated in early NEC and congress reports, which deal extensively with staff matters and update delegates on the union's growth. The latter is generally quantified both in numbers – membership figures – and organisational capacity – staff and departments. Making bureaucracy work was always a core preoccupation at head office and, in 1989, Ramaphosa was ‘pleased to report that all regions but one now have administrative staff’ and emphasised that ‘the administration department [30 staff] remains a mainstay of all the union's activities. With time it has become more efficient and professional and has proved to be the engine room of the union.’ Apart from the administration department, the organising department (27 employees) was in fact the only other one with staff deployed in all 16 regions but one.

From the early 1990s on, NEC meetings always started by dealing with the management of NUM human resources, including the appointment of new employees, probation periods, resignations or dismissals for motives as diverse as being under the influence of alcohol, absenteeism, or the mismanagement of union resources. Such problems were far from uncommon and they challenge the iconic figure of the ‘activist organiser’ described by Buhlungu. His analysis of the decline of the democratic tradition within South African unions – in which, he wrote, employment was ‘non-hierarchical, collectivist and driven by altruism’ – is based on his observation that ‘activist organisers’ became an endangered species after apartheid ended, when union employment became just a ‘conventional job in the labour market’.

Unions in the 1980s and early 1990s, however, were also ordinary workplaces. One permanent source of preoccupation with respect to building union structures was the high turnover in NUM staff, which was a reality back in the 1980s as is still the case today. This turnover was caused by union staff opting for the corporate sector, in mining or elsewhere, or for other, more lucrative jobs.