SHERI HAMILTON 17. PEDAGOGY OF STRUGGLE #OutsourcingMustFall INTRODUCTION In October 2015, 10000 university students gathered at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, to demand the scrapping of proposed fee increases and the insourcing of workers. #FeesMustFall (FMF), the banner adopted, unified protests initially directed against apartheid-like practices such as language policies and colonial symbols at historically white universities. At its height, FMF demonstrated the potential to unite the decade-long, often militant but uncoordinated student protests against academic and financial exclusions mainly at historically black universities. It was the FMF’s economic demands – no fee increases – that enabled it to grow into a national movement that forced the government to concede. This demand united the majority of students – the poorest, the ‘missing middle’1 – and attracted the sympathies of wealthier students. FMF not only temporarily halted fee increases, but secured in-principle agreements to scrap the outsourcing of workers at some historically white universities – a practice that was embedded in the restructuring of higher education rooted in the neoliberal economic policy, Growth Employment and Redistribution, adopted in 1996 by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government. As fresh protests broke out a year later following the announcement of fee increases that will be capped at eight per cent for the 2017 academic year, the threat to student unity is posed by differentially applied increases. Students are demanding free education while government has exempted poor students who are recipients of its loan scheme, excluding the ‘missing middle’ for whose funding government is appealing to the private sector. Having learned the lessons of FMF in 2015, the government appears to be much more prepared for a prolonged struggle which, at the time of writing, had resulted in the shutdown of a number of institutions. Whether the students have learned the lessons of the 2015 FMF struggle to not only build and sustain their unity but to draw upon the support of wider layers of workers will become clearer in the next period. The main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate through the example of a campaign among outsourced workers, mostly not organised under unions, the educational potential and willingness of workers to struggle against exploitation and social A. von Kotze & S. Walters (Eds.), Forging Solidarity, 181–192. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access s. hAMILTON injustice when there is effective political influence and leadership. I argue, firstly, that the form of solidarity which existed between workers and students during FMF was an expression of ‘class’ solidarity and provided a firm basis upon which to cut across divisions that later emerged among students. Secondly, I argue that a key aspect of building ‘class’ solidarity is to re-establish the authenticity of the ‘traditional forms of knowledge’ of the working class (Sawchuk, 2007), the core ideas of which are based on Marxism, representing the generalised experience of this class (Arendse, 2016). Thirdly, I argue that the role of the revolutionary party is key in (re)building and revitalising working-class organisations (trade unions, social democratic, communist and labour parties) – eviscerated, as argued by Peter Sawchuk (2007), by the consequences of neoliberalism. I maintain that these eviscerations are compounded by the crisis in the leadership of the working class following the dismantling of the former Soviet Union. In South Africa, this crisis was reflected in the expulsion in December 2015 of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA),2 the largest affiliate of the main trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and in the factional battles among its alliance partners, the ruling ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and its affiliated student structures in the Progress Youth Alliance. I draw upon John Holst (1999) and Bob Boughton (2013, p. 241) to argue that popular education, conceived of in terms of its appreciation for the influence of ‘organised and disciplined political leadership’ offered by ‘Marxist revolutionary parties’, has a key role to play in building organisations capable of waging an effective struggle to end oppression and exploitation. I further draw on the ideas of Sawchuck (2007) and Linda Cooper (2005, p. 67) about working-class organisations as ‘tools of mediation’ in developing consciousness through struggle to explore these questions through the experiences of the #OutsourcingMustFall (OMF) campaign.3 The OMF campaign was initiated after the FMF movement had ebbed in the wake of the zero per cent fee increase victory in 2015 and the onset of end-of-year examinations. OMF focused on those institutions where there were no insourcing agreements, targeting three provinces: Gauteng, Free State and Western Cape. Interviews with five activists from the Workers’ and Socialist Party (WASP)4 and its affiliate, the Socialist Youth Movement (SYM), were selected for their key roles in the campaign and to distil a student, union and party perspective. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the campaign in Tshwane where university workers went on strike, drawing in others like City of Tshwane workers. Background According to J. Pendlebury and L. van der Walt (Dumba, 2014), the government’s neoliberal policies were justified as necessary for deracialising and transforming higher education and for integrating it into the international community. In reality, the previously racially divided institutions were subjected to government subsidy 182 Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access PEDAGOGY of struggle cuts. Salim Vally (2016) shows how higher education state funding declined in real terms from 49 per cent in 2000 to 40 per cent in 2012. These income losses occurred as headcount enrolment increased by over 20 per cent between 2005 and 2010 (Hamilton, 2013). University measures to compensate for the loss in income included increasing student fees by 7 per cent between 2005 and 2012 (Vally, 2016), freezing permanent academic posts, employing temporary staff and outsourcing cleaning, retail, security and gardening services – in effect retrenching the permanently employed workers who had provided these services in-house (Hamilton, 2013). Noreen Dumba (2014), citing L. Ellram and C. Billington (2001), defines ‘outsourcing’ as the transfer of the production of goods and/or services performed internally to an external party. She explains that outsourcing is extolled as ‘cost effective, efficient, productive and strategic’ (Dumba, 2014, p. 9). But she shows through a cost accounting analysis based on the experience of the University of the Witwatersrand that it results in increased ‘transaction costs’. These costs are attributed to factors such as cost creep from an increase in complaints and worker unrest, the loss of coordination efficiency and of tacit skills and organisational memory (Adler et al., 2000, in Dumba, 2014). Dumba shows further how these different elements combine to achieve the opposite of the organisational efficiencies claimed to justify outsourcing. Since its inception, workers resisted outsourcing because of the poor working conditions and wages offered by outsourcing companies. During the student protests, FMF provided a national profile for the struggle for insourcing by incorporating it into their demands against fee hikes. FMF was therefore able to achieve what powerful organisations like trade unions had been unable to. This was despite the passing of legislation in early 2015 effectively banning ‘labour broking’,5 of which outsourcing is a form, and the passing of union resolutions routinely denouncing labour broking and precarious work as ‘wage slavery’. But apart from the education workshops of non-governmental organisations such as the Johannesburg-based Casual Workers’ Advice Office on the new labour law amendments, there was no effective national mobilisation to make workers aware of their new rights or, indeed, to wage a struggle to demand insourcing until the FMF protests. Outsourcing is rooted in attempts to reverse the fall in profits after the post-war boom, the effects of which began to appear after the oil crisis in the 1970s. This resulted in what Christine Bischoff (2015) describes as the decline in industrial production and employment in manufacturing, which was accompanied by an increase in employment in the service and public sectors. Bischoff explains how the new global division of labour undermined the traditional labour strategy of organising along industrial lines because global companies deliberately shift production and manufacturing to contract manufacturers through outsourcing (Bischoff, 2015). These developments have given birth to the ‘precariat’, Guy Standing’s (2011) reference to workers in insecure, poorly paid jobs across all sectors. Multinational companies such as Fidelity Security, GQ4S, Bidvest (formerly Prestige) and Servest found on university campuses have been subcontracted to provide services 183 Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access s. hAMILTON previously provided by permanently employed workers. Often the same workers are re-employed by the outsourcing companies without