OPNION: The role of working men and women in nation building cannot be understated. 

The story of the decolonisation of Africa cannot be complete without mention of the influential role of the trade union movement in determining labour and industrial relations and more importantly in shaping the political and economic agenda of the time.

South Africa, Africa’s economic powerhouse, has the largest trade union movement on the continent. It is part of the tripartite alliance that has governed the country for the past 16 years. 

As we look back at the journey travelled so far, what can we say about our collective knowledge of the concept of trade unionism? What are its origins? How effective is trade unionism as an instrument for economic and social change?

In pre-colonial Africa, we can safely say that trade unions did not exist as they would have served no purpose. 

The origins of unions can be traced from the 18th century that saw the rapid expansion in Europe of industrial society with its appetite for human capital in the work places. 

A trade union is a body corporate organised to promote and protect the interests of members. 

A trade is defined as the exchange of products and/or services with the use of money. The change of labour time for cash is a trade. 

The emergence of corporate civilisation brought with it challenges and opportunities. The challenge was how to convert feudal labour not a commodity that can be purchased in the marketplace. 

Unlike slavery, the labour exchange market involved free agents who could contract voluntarily.

With respect to slavery, a new ideology was crafted which classified human beings deemed as uncivilised to be treated as any asset class that could be owned and controlled for the duration of its life by the purchaser. 

Instead of exchanging a certain portion of one’s day for cash, a slave was paid for in advance to the owner and henceforth became the property of the purchaser.

Although an enterprise is a juristic person, it is not normally easy to alienate its interests from those of its founders notwithstanding the provisions of the Companies Act which provides for the separation of rights and obligations between the company and the shareholders. 

Employers are contracted to the company and not to the shareholder and yet most employees believe that they work for the shareholder.

The shareholder only has a residual claim on the company and is only entitled to the income that the company does not want for itself. Before any profit is declared, all the service providers need to be paid including the tax authorities. 

This being the case, it means that a salary or wage has to be negotiated in arrears i.e. a worker has to agree to the cost of his time to the company prior to getting the salary. 

The first month of work, a worker has to self-provide in anticipation of payment at the end. In the case of capital assets, the company has to make the arrangements to secure the full amount required for the asset. The same was true for slave labour.

In terms of power relationships, it was recognised that employers on behalf of companies had a stronger bargaining position against workers at the retail level hence the need to organise wholesale platforms to represent the interest of the workers. 

However, it must be recognised that each workers has a contract with the company but the conditions of work, benefits and related issues require a collective voice.

The concept of mutuality is not unique to the labour movement. What is a challenge in Africa is that the number of working people compared to non-working people is so small and yet the voice of the labour movement on political, social and economic issues is strong. 

The nature and context of the struggle for independence necessitated that the working people whose rights in the labour market were not respected on account of their race taking a leading and active role. 

The argument advanced by proponents of race-based policies was that the European way of life did not interfere with the native African worldview and, therefore, the introduction of a market system underpinned by an unjust constitutional order could not be blamed for the poverty in Africa. 

It was argued that even if settlers had not visited Africa, the relationship between native African and poverty would have been the same as it is in Haiti or Liberia, for instance.

The working people did present a challenge. You had black and white employees on the same shop floor. One would get paid more for the same work than the other just on the basis of skin colour. One would be treated as a second class citizen than another. One would never be allowed to be a shareholder of a company than the other. The list goes on and then came a generation of Africans who refused to accept the world as they were exposed to it. 

They formed clubs representing the coalition of the willing. These were political parties whose mission was to change the constitutional order. At work places where employees felt that their voices could only be heard if they pooled their grievances together, it also became a theatre for struggle.

The ideology that informed most of the struggles in the workplace was based on Karl Marx’s conception of a capitalist system and the purported dialectic relationship between workers and capitalists. 

Notwithstanding the fact that, for example, when I work for company like Microsoft, it would be wrong to say that I work for the shareholders. 

The company’s management are also contractors to the company and, therefore, any struggle that may take place at the work place has to be described as a consequence of human interaction.

The attitude of employees cannot also determine their altitude. In any organisation it is healthy to have order. When a product is produced by a company and invoiced out it becomes indivisible. 

One cannot disaggregate the product and split it into pieces in order to recognise the contribution of the various input providers. This being the case, the only rational basis of rewarding labour becomes a market linked arrangement. 

If the worker is underpaid then he/she knows what to do. In an expanding economy good employers rarely have difficulty in recruitment.

Unions benefit more bad employees and become more relevant in stagnant economies. In rigid labour markets, unions can be counterproductive. 

The fact that the ruling class in post-colonial Africa is largely drawn from political unions makes it difficult to discourage the labour movement from wanting to have a say in politics. 

The competition for state jobs invariably ends between one class of working people and another. 

Some end up working for the state as representatives of the working people and yet behave no differently from the employers they used to despise before assuming state functions.

Is there democracy in Africa’s trade unions? The answer is simple. Democracy is difficult to achieve when most of the workers would rather focus on advancing their personal welfare than worry about the bigger picture. 

Unions tend to be more effective in public institutions than private ones where employers would be foolhardy to underpay hard working employees.

Union leadership in Africa tends to self perpetuate itself with no or little accountability to the rank and file members. This situation is no different from that obtaining in political clubs. Whoever assumes a leadership position ends up believing in indispensability.

The interests of workers are best advanced in a free and dynamic economy rather than in an economy where workers believe that they can use their muscle to extract more from a company that cannot speak for itself about the dangers of extracting value or taking blood from it for short-term expediency than long-term growth and security.

Even the Catholic Church towards the end of the 19th Century endorsed unions when Pope Leo XIII in his 'Magna Carta': Rerum Novarum against the atrocities workers faced and demanded that workers should be granted certain rights and safety regulations. 

No one can doubt that unions can make a difference to a civilisation but what is needed is for the beneficiaries to assume ownership of their own project. Although we all need to see, for example, a well functioning state very few of us want to be involved in making it happen.

After all, Africa Heritage Society www.africa-heritage.com an organisation that I am a member of is a mutual benefit association. Old Mutual was a mutual benefit association so is FIFA. What makes organisations effective is the contribution of the members that comprise it.  

The imbalance in the rights of workers in regards to “masters/owners” is no different to what the 18th century economist, Adam Smith noted when he wrote in the Wealth of Nations that: “We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.

When workers combine, masters . . . never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen.”

It is the trade unions who often assume leadership positions in political contestations and yet their worldview would suggest that fixing prices of goods and services sold in the market place from which they draw an income is a progressive step forgetting that such actions have been shown time after time to have unintended consequences.

A labour market that is not flexible ultimately undermines the interests of the purported beneficiaries. We all want a better and progressive world but this comes with obligations. 

The human spirit is difficult to manage and manipulate. A society that allows, for instance, an angry worker to organise his affairs and use the market system to revenge is better than a system in which employers are forced to accept an administrative regime in which the price of labour is fixed in smoking rooms. 

There is nothing to stop African trade unions from forming mutual aid benefit association to provide least cost financial, supply chain and other solutions. 

If working people are angry with a bank there should be no impediment for them to set up an alternative financial platform to serve them rather than force the banks that serve them to look at profit as a sin. – ZinOmline