Steyr — Nigeria Yusuf Bangura

EDITORIAL This issue of the Review is focused largely on labour and trade unionism in West and South Africa. As in the bargaining situation facing organised labour elsewhere in the capitalist West, the best cards seem to be held by the employers. The recession beginning in the mid-seventies has created adverse labour market conditions for workers in many countries, but more potently at the level of ideology, has created a whole rash of new management doctrines — phrased in terms of 'rationalisation', 'international competititiveness', 'technical need' and the wonders of 'privatisation'. These onslaughts have confused labour's responses and allowed management to pursue cross-national industrial strategies under the guise of furthering the national interest. The interests of labour, by the same token, have been defined as unpatriotic and sectional. These forms of encounter were strongly at work in the case of the vehicle assembly plant in Nigeria studied by Bangura. Initially, the strong reaction of the workers to threats of retrenchment and redundancy forced the management onto the defensive, with the workers apparently bringing the management to heel. However, this was a short-lived victory, as there is a genuine overcapacity in the industry (made worse by the new two-tier foreign exchange system) and the management were able to cow the labour force by threatening massive reductions in output. Small wonder that Bangura concludes that plant-wide struggles have to be transcended in favour of mass-based education, the forging of broad alliances among workers from various industries and the public service, and democratic links with other vital sectors of the society like the peasantry, the progressive intelligentisia and various sectors of the urban poor who have been seriously affected by the adjustment programme of the state and capital. The need for the unions to reach out beyond their memberships and the work site and for labour to join in alliance with other forces in asserting and preserving democratic principles is an argument expanded beyond the Nigerian case to a much wider canvas and more ambitious thesis by von Freyhold. In assessing the role of workers' movements in societal transformation, she asserts that proletarian struggle has always been most successful when joined with other popular initiatives. This has been particularly so in Africa with its colonial history involving racial as well as class oppression, von Freyhold thus sees workers as a key element in a popular struggle to reduce the violence and power of the state, to force the ruling classes into a recognition of the inviolability of life and the right of people to defend their own means of survival. This struggle, moreover, is specifically against cultural and ecological takeover by uncaring transnational capital, the form of dependency most opposed by von Freyhold. 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY While von Preyhold draws on India as an example where there is at least public discussion of the need for the working class to relate to social movements based on other than class interests, her appeal is essentially at the level of the theoretical need for workers to go beyond their narrower claim on class loyalties in favour of a wider assertion to democratic power. It may be argued that just such a role is necessitated for the burgeoning labour movement in South Africa, where there is simply no way the struggle against capital can be insulated from the struggle against the state. Indeed, with large capital often presenting a more progressive face than the apartheid state, it may be that some forms of resistance are as much directed at state controls as at company policies. This has led, as Webster shows, to the re- emergence of 'alliance politics' or 'political unionism' alongside 'collective bargaining unionism'. This form of union politics seems to draw something from the 1950s when the South African Congress of Trade Unions sought to complement its industrial weakness (particularly regionally, in Natal) with its political support drawn from extra-working class forces. The linking of labour to community demands is a tendency that is violently opposed by the government — who see it as a covert means of reintroducing banned black political organisations — and by capital — who would prefer to confine their relationship to labour to the bargaining table. Where there are so few representative organisations of black majority, the democratic role of labour in South Africa offers some hope to the dispossessed and some defence against arbitrary state power. At the same time, attempts by the state to control and subordinate unions in post-colonial and post-revolutionary situations suggest that the unions would be wise to approach their wider role in a cautious spirit. As Webster indicates, it is precisely on the question of how far priority should be placed on worker and workplace based issues as against broader political concerns that debate is currently focused. In practice there has been increasing involvement of unions in community based issues. And the weight of the argument has fallen on the side of a clear acknowledgement that workers' struggles inevitably incorporate a political dimension. But it is the position of the largest confederation of African trade unions that workers' organisation should stop far short of subordinating themselves to the decision making machinery of political organisations. Rather they should retain the independence to choose the political issues they will involve themselves in and the manner in which that involvement should be expressed. Workers' organisations are increasingly directly involved in the political struggle of South Africa and on this basis have become specific targets of the repressive state apparatus. But if allied with other elements of popular struggle, it remains the conviction of many that their autonomy should be strenuously preserved. The increasing sophistication of the labour movement in coping with the variety of tasks that are now demanded of it is shown in the statement of the Executive Committee of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which we reproduce in our Briefings section. This statement should be read in conjunction with an earlier COSATU document carried in ROAPE 35. Other briefings that relate to our principal theme include Sorab Sadri's search behind the veil drawn over Unilever's pension plan in Nigeria. As he shows, Nigerian workers had first to demystify before they could oppose a plan that was apparently, but only apparently, made in their interests. Another item is introduced by Brian Wood, of the Namibia Support Committee, who interviews Ben Ulenge, of the National Union of Namibian Workers. What we publish here is an extract of a much longer interview, in which EDITORIAL 3 we concentrate on the personal and environmental factors that go into the making of an African working class leader. The conservative US unions believe that they too should have a role in influencing the education of African trade unionists. They exert their influence through the African-American Labor Center (AALC), a body also supported by agencies and organisations even closer to the state department than the AFL-CIO. Though many African trade unionists will have encountered the AALC and perhaps participated in its specialised training workshops, Godfried's analysis is the first to give a continental-wide picture to the US's attempts to 'educate' African unionists to accept a definition of trade union activity which focuses strictly on economistic goals through collective bargaining techniques and views any political role for workers' organisations with extreme distaste. It is hardly surprising that in recent years the AALC has devoted particular attention to South Africa in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of African trade unionists, persuading them of the virtues of that particular brand of trade union activity characteristic of the United States. That labour organisations should be at the forefront of imperialistic overtures may well be unpalatable, yet as Godfried's account shows, this is a phenomenon which can and must not be overlooked. Both the articles and the briefings on our substantive theme lead to one conclusion. These are difficult times for African labour movements. They are confronted by a massive reduction in their bargaining power as the reserve army of the unemployed grows larger and larger; the state is hostile — in South Africa, violently so; employers are using increasingly more impenetrable ideologies, strategies and tactics, while democratic forces are making more claims on the labour movement. In the face of these pressures, workers have responded with great courage, even heroism. But the virtues of working class solidarity and resistance, necessary and commendable as they are, have now to be supplemented by more complex forms of political action and association. The unions need friends in the social movements (feminist, ecological, cultural and democratic) just as these movements need working class support. The terms of the alliance, the protection of working class interests and the leadership and programmes of newly socially conscious labour movements still need elaboration, but the need for such a convergence of democratic and working class politics is inescapable. Carolyn Baylies and Robin Cohen The Recession and Workers' Struggles in the Vehicle Assembly Plants: Steyr — Nigeria Yusuf Bangura Retrenchment In Nigerian vehicle assembly plants in consequence of economic recession has provoked an active response from the workforce. At Steyr-Nigeria in Bauchi, workers walked out in October 1985 in protest at the management's intransigence in negotiations with union officials. Bangura charts their initial success and provides a lucid account of the reasons for their ultimate failure. His analysis of the Steyr-Nigeria dispute is explicitly situated within the broader context of policy and economic performance in the Nigerian economy as a whole. He considers the extent to which workers emerged as victims of policy essentially motivated by the interests of quick profits and production of luxury consumer goods for an emergent bourgeoisie.

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