South Africa's Social Movement Unionism and the Privatization of Urban Space

Many studies of the South African black labor movement under apartheid have underlined the importance of connections between trade unions, civil society organizations, and social movements. Gay Seidman's comparison of labor politics in South Africa and BrazilFootnote ⁶ showed how the authoritarianism of the apartheid state facilitated the politicization of shop-floor wage-related struggles. Labor scholars have captured South Africa's convergence of labor struggles and community mobilization in the concept of “social movement unionism,” which over the past two decades has become increasingly influential in both industrializing and industrialized countries. Social movement unionism can be defined as the internalization by the unions of social movements' demands and organizational modalities. Social movement unions are organizations that combine workplace demands with claims for political change and democratization, and mobilize workers across multiple locales. Even if they often advocate working-class leadership in social alliances, social movement unions cooperate with civil society organizations on grounds of strategy and principle, rather than tactics and contingency.Footnote ⁷

Cases like South Africa and Brazil show that the importance of social movement unionism under political authoritarianism is largely explained by general political conditions of lack of democracy and workers' rights, which facilitate the politicization of workers' demands and the unions' quest for alliances with other social sectors. Other authors argue that local organizational dynamics are decisive to explain trade unions' successes and failures to “overcome artificial spatial divides between the workplace and the broader community.”Footnote ⁸ Social movement unionism, therefore, does not merely provide an unproblematic “model” of union organizing, applicable without regard to the specificities of sectors and locales.

Social movement unionism has also figured prominently within a renewed scholarly interest in public workers' struggles, previously marginalized in labor studies. As US historian Joseph Slater argues, public workers, like private employees, face challenges deriving from labor processes and normative frameworks governing conditions of employment and service provision.Footnote ⁹ At the same time, their juridical construction as servants of the state can be used to stigmatize and constrain wage militancy and contract bargaining, but it also facilitates the articulation of their tactics and demands on a directly political ground. The peculiar position of municipal employees as workers and citizens seems to confer distinct advantages for labor-community alliances that articulate a discourse of “public needs” to buttress the unions' demands on moral grounds.Footnote ¹⁰

In the case of South Africa, engagement in political struggles has accompanied black workers' opposition to state racism throughout the twentieth century. Labor-community alliances gained an unparalleled strength in the second half of the 1980s, a decade of crisis for the apartheid regime and of generalized insurgency in many black urban townships.

The 1970s saw the tumultuous growth of a black workers' movement that was largely centered on workplace organizations and demands for better wages and working conditions. In 1979 most of these unions, especially in the metal, chemical, and textile industries, formed the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). FOSATU saw itself as a federation of shop-floor unions, and chose not to align with political demands, or with the national liberation movement led by the ANC in exile. In the following decade, FOSATU unions' rank-and-file members reclaimed a greater involvement of the federation in broader social conflicts and national liberation politics. Popular mobilization had by then started to oppose not only apartheid oppression and worsening living conditions, but also the introduction by the regime of limited social reforms, which still eschewed full political equality. A new generation of activists became engaged in local social movement organizations, or “civics,” which undermined the legitimacy of racially segregated municipal authorities.

During the 1980s, FOSATU rank-and-file members succeeded in driving the federation to support the civics' demands for political democracy, decent housing, and municipal services. Union leaders initially resisted calls to side with social movements, as they feared losing power to community militants that did not share FOSATU's emphasis on shop-floor-based democratic worker control.Footnote ¹¹ They were also alarmed that nationalist-leaning community organizations were often led by middle-class and “petty-bourgeois” sections of the black townships.Footnote ¹²

The 1980s also saw the emergence of a new generation of “community unions,” especially strong in the Eastern Cape. Defining elements of the “community unions” were their overt alliance with antiapartheid civics and their preference for mobilizing through community rallies as well as on the shop floor. Many of them belonged to the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF). Community unions were usually critical of FOSATU, as they saw shop-floor struggles inextricably linked to political liberation.Footnote ¹³ As an official of a prominent community union, the South African and Allied Workers Union (SAAWU) had put it:

By the mid-1980s, FOSATU was actively engaged in the arena of local social movement politics, even if it remained independent from the ANC. During the 1984–85 insurrection of the black townships in the industrial concentration of the East Rand, adjacent to Johannesburg, FOSATU participated in civics and mobilized for municipal services and housing rights.Footnote ¹⁵ FOSATU's turn to social movement unionism was ultimately more a pragmatic response to the intensified political oppression facing its members than a conscious pro-ANC ideological choice.Footnote ¹⁶

It was in this context that local labor analysts started to employ the expression “social movement unionism”: For them the involvement in sociopolitical and community struggles by unions coming from different traditions transcended earlier divisions between shop-floor and community unions.Footnote ¹⁷ Social movement unionism also revived a tradition of trade-union political engagement dating back to the historical experiences of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union in the 1920s, and the unions' defiance of early apartheid laws in the 1950s.

As trade unions became more involved in community struggles, they took a stance against social policy reforms proffered by the late-apartheid state. In the 1980s, the regime decisively turned towards the privatization of the urban space. Economic crisis and labor struggles had led the government to restructure urban spaces in ways that partially departed from strict racial segregation. Until the mid-1970s, the government considered urbanized Africans essentially as temporary city residents, and very little public investment had taken place in African townships. Following the 1979 report of the Riekert Commission of Inquiry, however, urban rights for Africans started to be redefined, and the government recommended permanent city residence for those with stable jobs.Footnote ¹⁸ The Riekert report departed from earlier policy discourse by advocating new intra-African class divides and market-based inequalities to partially supersede institutionally-defined racial segregation. It saw the stabilization of a limited layer of urban African population as the condition to make municipal services dependent on users' payments with the aim “to recover more and more of the cost of services from the black communities themselves.”Footnote ¹⁹

For the government, the growth of an African labor aristocracy could generate an ethic of ownership among the black population and thus a bourgeois stake in political stability. This program would be pursued through municipal housing privatization and the sale of council-owned accommodations. Facilitated first by the 1983 Promotion of Local Government Affairs Act, the state defined a normative framework for municipalities that intended to increase private-sector participation in the provision of services. Then, in 1985, a new policy of “orderly urbanization” provided urban residential rights to African full-time workers and aspiring middle classes, seen as a buffer against social radicalism. In turn, expanded income opportunities for urbanized Africans and the promotion of individual financial responsibility could arguably promote user payments for municipal services, addressing the lack of resources that affected most black municipalities.Footnote ²⁰ “White” city councils, however, were exempted from subsidizing services for black townships.Footnote ²¹ Instead, the government created in African urban areas segregated elected councils, the “black local authorities,” which became increasingly responsible for financing services and utilities with locally collected rents and taxes.Footnote ²²

Labor opposition to late-apartheid privatization of urban space continued the tradition of social movement unionism. By the late 1980s, township residents were widely boycotting the payment of rents to black local authorities, and participation in segregated local council elections was minimal. A state of emergency declared by the government had banned many political organizations, therefore trade unions replaced them in voicing demands for democratic change and opposition to state urban policies.

COSATU was launched in 1985 from the merger of FOSATU and other union organizations. The new union federation formally recognized the ANC's political leadership in the antiapartheid struggle. Cementing the alliance between COSATU and the ANC was an older political manifesto, the 1955 Freedom Charter, which included a program of public control of the economy. For COSATU it represented a weapon against the apartheid government's privatization agenda. COSATU in particular saw the privatization of municipal services as conducive to higher prices, job losses, and lower wages linked to “many different types of work contracts—like subcontracting, short-term contracts, home working, part-time work and more casuals.”Footnote ²³

The legalization of the ANC in 1990 inaugurated the democratic transition, culminating in the 1994 national elections. Yet democratic transition coincided with the gradual adoption by the ANC of a conservative macroeconomic paradigm that prioritized the competitiveness and the profitability of the private sector, rebuffed popular expectations for radical redistributive policies, and eschewed social radicalism. It also represented a departure from the Freedom Charter to the extent that it relinquished the ANC's earlier exclusive emphasis on public ownership and opened the door to privatization. After 1994, COSATU criticized the ANC's turn to neoliberalism while maintaining its alliance with the new ruling party. Some COSATU unions were particularly vocal not only in condemning the government's conservative turn, but also in stigmatizing the federation's timidity in opposing it. SAMWU felt, in particular, that the ANC's newly found proprivatization agenda directly affected its members. In advocating a more radical position for COSATU, the union argued that the federation's political closeness to the ANC could weaken its antineoliberal stance:

COSATU leadership, however, did not want to undermine its place in the new state. COSATU's positions increasingly reflected a realization that union radicalism, successful against authoritarianism in the past, could jeopardize democratization, under which labor had to move from a “politics of resistance” to a “politics of reconstruction.”Footnote ²⁵ SAMWU, instead, charted an independent course, denouncing the inadequacy of the ANC's neoliberalism in tackling socioeconomic inequalities, and expressed public workers' fears that privatization could undermine their newly gained status. Social movement unionism decisively influenced SAMWU's approaches and strategies in this emerging struggle.

SAMWU as a Social Movement Union: Municipal Workers between Workplace and Community

SAMWU's adoption of social movement unionism under apartheid did not primarily emerge as a response to political authoritarianism, which was indeed successful in thwarting municipal unionization until the late 1980s. Rather it responded to the union's need to articulate a discursive strategy and a moral standing based on its members' specific location as workers and community residents, and as producers and consumers of services.

The apartheid system of local government entailed specific forms of labor process and managerial control that delayed the unionization of African municipal workers. City councils recruited their African employees among migrant workers from rural “homelands,” and subjected them to particularly stringent regulations. Racially-segregated housing in municipal “compounds,” the territorial dispersal of workplaces, and repressive management deterred union organizing. National legislation and local bylaws denied local government employees the right to strike and bargain collectively, even after legislative changes in 1979 recognized such rights for trade unions with African members.Footnote ²⁶

Johannesburg municipal workers started mobilizing at an early stage. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth century the city experienced a rapid growth driven by mining, which spearheaded local industrialization. The preeminence of market forces and deference to private investment allowed institutional neglect of municipal infrastructures. In the absence of public sewage systems, for example, the city council hired low-wage migrant “bucket boys,” largely from the AmaBhaka population of Transkei, for night soil collection. When, as early as 1918, the “bucket boys” went on a wage strike, they were faced with heavy police repression. Yet their militancy helped steer the local ANC, still led by moderate African elites, in a more radical direction.Footnote ²⁷

But the consolidation of the apartheid regime stymied independent union organizing among African municipal employees. Following the 1973 “Durban strikes,” erupting after a decade of repression and demobilization, African trade unions reemerged in various manufacturing industries. “Colored” and Indian municipal workers belonged sporadically to racially segregated branches (or “parallel” unions) of the white-dominated, conservative Trade Unions' Council of South Africa. Still no union sought to organize African local government employees. Only in the early 1980s did African municipal workers reappear on the landscape of industrial conflict.

In July 1980, a strike by 12,000 African migrants, the bulk of the Johannesburg City Council's 14,000-strong black workforce, turned into a watershed event. The strikers' demands for higher wages reflected their deteriorating living conditions. Initially, the industrial action began as a wildcat, but the participants then approached the Black Municipal Workers' Union (BMWU) for support. The BMWU had been launched only one month earlier by Joseph Mavi, a former official of the African Transport Workers' Union, a “parallel” union of the white federation. The Transport Workers had expelled Mavi in response to his political activism in support of residential rights for “illegal” black urban dwellers.Footnote ²⁸ Although the still poorly organized BMWU advised the strikers to proceed cautiously, the strike gathered momentum spontaneously. The city council saw the action as the work of “intimidators” with political agendasFootnote ²⁹ and responded with repression, refused to negotiate with the union and dismissed thousands of strikers. Many strikers were then either deported to the rural “homelands,” or charged under antistrike legislation.Footnote ³⁰

The repression of the 1980 strike again delayed the unionization of African municipal employees by almost a decade. After its launch in 1985, COSATU had adopted a “one industry, one union” policy: affiliates with members in the same sector had to merge them into larger unions. Five trade unions, coming from different traditions, joined in 1987 to form SAMWU. Participants in the merger included both shop-floor unions in the old FOSATU tradition and pro-ANC African community unions.Footnote ³¹

The most important contribution to SAMWU came from an organization that was rather atypical in South Africa's oppositional union landscape, the Cape Town Municipal Workers' Association (CTMWA). A formerly white-dominated, conservative, and bureaucratized union, in 1964 the CTMWA was taken over by a group of young organizers, whose aim was to democratize it and make it accountable to the rank and file.Footnote ³² The new CTMWA leadership had limited experience, and its first battles were focused on “bread and butter” issues. In the militant climate of the 1970s, the union adopted a more political agenda, outspokenly critical of apartheid, and refused to join the established white labor movement.Footnote ³³ Its strong roots in shop-floor organizing help explain its recruiting successes: By the mid-1970s, the CTMWA had eighty-four percent of unionized municipal employees in its ranks.Footnote ³⁴

In the 1980s the CTMWA further sharpened its political profile, supporting students' school boycotts in Cape TownFootnote ³⁵ and vociferously opposing the government's “orderly urbanization” policy. It condemned in particular municipal housing privatization as well as escalating rents and tariffs.Footnote ³⁶ Although it shared FOSATU's emphasis on shop-floor structures and worker control, the CTMWA also participated in community struggles, which it considered conducive to workers' unity and to “the fulfillment of [workers'] rights as citizens.”Footnote ³⁷ The union believed that “worker control is important, but is not enough,” and ultimately rejected “an economistic view of trade union unity.” It advocated instead a “principled unity,” based on democracy, nonracialism, and the view that “our struggle is not only for economic betterment of workers, but against Apartheid, and political oppression.”Footnote ³⁸

SAMWU inherited the CTMWA's peculiar blend of shop-floor based and community-oriented trade unionism. Opposition to the privatization and deregulation of municipal services provided one of SAMWU's first terrains of contestation. In 1988 the white National Party government encouraged private participation in municipal services. The municipalities' preferred solution was to subcontract utilities to the private sector or to establish “commercialized” municipality-owned companies, rather than large-scale assets sale. SAMWU's “antiprivatization campaign” was inaugurated in 1988, and the union successfully pressed COSATU the following year to develop coordinated initiatives against privatization in the public sector.Footnote ³⁹ SAMWU's position shaped COSATU's analysis that late Apartheid corporatization and subcontracting amounted to “privatization through the back door,” which departed from decades of state intervention and public ownership.Footnote ⁴⁰

SAMWU was particularly alarmed that Apartheid urban restructuring could encourage city councils to outsource jobs in segregated black municipalities to nonunion private companies.Footnote ⁴¹ In the case of Johannesburg, in 1988 the city council had slated 125 of its functions, out of a list of 191, for possible partnerships with the private sector.Footnote ⁴² In 1991, the chairman of the council's management committee revealed the municipality's intention to reduce its workforce from 23,000 to 15,000.Footnote ⁴³

The late 1980s witnessed the widespread collapse of the black local authorities. Under the banner of “people's power,” ANC-aligned civics stepped up in black townships campaigns to boycott the payment of fees for water and electricity. In 1988 a movement to stop payments of mortgages for privatized council housing started in the Eastern Cape and rapidly reached the Johannesburg region.Footnote ⁴⁴ Loosely coordinated at a national level within the United Democratic Front, the “civics” were nonetheless primarily responsive to local leaders. Their tactics included physical attacks on local township councilors, seen as collaborators of the apartheid regime.

Urban instability and conflict continued after the National Party government legalized the ANC in February 1990 and negotiations towards the first democratic elections began. Escalating violence also strained the relationships between SAMWU and civic organizations. In 1992 the union noticed that, despite the fact that “municipal workers are also residents at the same time,” township dwellers often attacked SAMWU members, identified with the discredited black local authorities.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a newly legalized political party on the path to power, the ANC wanted to end mass boycotts of rents, fees, and mortgages, which jeopardized a peaceful transfer of power at the local level. Footnote ⁴⁶ The first half of the 1990s saw the proliferation of municipal “forums” aimed to restore local governance in preparation for the 1994 democratic elections. The forums included apartheid-era municipal councils, trade unions, and antiapartheid civics. They were interim structures intended to negotiate municipal rates, the payment of arrears, and the end of boycotts.Footnote ⁴⁷

In 1991 the United Democratic Front was replaced by a new, more tightly centralized pro-ANC national civil society structure, the South African National Civics Organization (SANCO). Its mandate was, in the words of one of its leaders, to turn the civics' role from “protest organizations” to proponents of “developmental programmes”Footnote ⁴⁸ to be negotiated with new democratic municipalities. Before the 1994 elections COSATU and SANCO tried, as ANC allies, to insert in the party's electoral platform demands for municipal changes such as low flat rates in poor communities, the cross-subsidization of services from wealthy “white” suburbs, and the choice for public ownership of services. These demands were to some extent present in the ANC's 1994 platform, the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which recognized water, electricity, and housing as “basic needs,” advocated “lifeline tariffs” for the poor, and promoted “progressive block tariffs” for water to insure higher payments for unnecessary consumption.Footnote ⁴⁹

The postapartheid democratic dispensation and the 1996 Constitution eliminated the institutional distinction between “black” and “white” municipalities. The local government privatization that many councils had started at the end of apartheid was de facto deferred to the new desegregated city councils. To SAMWU, the subsequent restructuring of Johannesburg municipality under ANC rule smacked of a return to apartheid-era policies. SAMWU began mobilizing members and allies in opposition to such municipal corporationzation.

Worker Responses to Municipal Restructuring in Postapartheid Johannesburg

During the 1990s, SAMWU, like other public-sector unions, was one of the fastest growing COSATU affiliates. Its numerical weight shifted from Cape Town, as a legacy of the CTMWA era, to the newly established Gauteng province, with Johannesburg at its center. In 2003 Gauteng provided approximately one third of all SAMWU members.Footnote ⁵⁰ The postapartheid restructuring of the Johannesburg municipality, therefore, directly engaged SAMWU in its new stronghold.

South African local authorities entered the new democratic dispensation in a climate of fiscal austerity that reflected the ANC government's orthodox economic policies. By the end of the 1990s, municipalities were expected to raise from local sources approximately ninety percent of their budgets (mainly fees and rents).Footnote ⁵¹ Central government grants were cut by fifty-five percent between 1997 and 2000.Footnote ⁵² The 1998 White Paper on Local Government encouraged the contracting out of municipal services to the private sector.

In Johannesburg, unemployment stood at thirty-three percent in 2002, and access to services remained vastly unequal.Footnote ⁵³ Seventeen percent of the population lived in informal dwellings,Footnote ⁵⁴ while almost thirty percent of Soweto's predominantly African residents lived in informal settlements or apartheid-era “compounds.”Footnote ⁵⁵ One third of all African households had no running water, and one half had no flush toilets.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like most municipalities, after 1994 Johannesburg adopted aggressive policies of “cost recovery,” under which poor residents had to pay for services under threats of evictions and disconnections.Footnote ⁵⁷

After apartheid, a single, deracialized Johannesburg municipality was established for the first time in the city's history. The 2000 Municipal Structures Act mandated municipalities to integrate former “white” and “black” local authorities, and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC) came to include wealthy “white” suburbs like the former municipalities of Johannesburg, Sandton, and Randburg, as well as the sprawling working-class African township of Soweto, and massive shantytowns like Orange Farm.Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1997 the municipality, then organized as a transitional metro council, had declared a state of fiscal crisis linked to budget deficits and backlogs in service delivery. In October the Gauteng provincial government intervened by halting new capital investment, imposing a three-year freeze on permanent employment, and requiring a municipal restructuring based on “public-private partnership” agreements that would reconfigure services as independent business units.

Johannesburg's first nonracial local government elections in 1995 had placed the ANC in power with more than sixty percent of the council's seats. The new council therefore had a strong mandate to execute a program of municipal restructuring in accordance with the party's liberalization policies. In February 1999, the council, by then named GJMC, appointed a select committee, the Transformation Lekgotla, to restructure municipal services.

The GJMC gave the Lekgotla (“council”) full decisionmaking authority, even if it was an unelected administrative entity, to devise a program of municipal restructuring. The Lekgotla sat jointly with a four-member management team, also appointed by the GJMC, charged with implementing the restructuring program. The ANC majority in the council agreed that the centralization of policymaking in the hands of unelected administrators was the fastest, most effective way to restructure city governance.Footnote ⁵⁹ A comprehensive “organization review,” which the municipality had contracted to the consultancy agency PriceWaterhouse & Cooper, recommended the corporatization of municipal departments, predicting however that:

Johannesburg's management team was chaired by the city manager, Khetso Gordhan. An ANC politician and former activist from Natal, he had just completed a drastic downsizing exercise as the director general in the Department of Transport. Two months after his appointment, Gordhan presented a comprehensive restructuring plan, called “iGoli 2002,” to the council, which approved it on March 16, 1999.

IGoli 2002 transferred trading services like water, electricity, and waste management from municipal departments to autonomous business units, or “utilities, agencies and corporatized” (UAC) entities, of which the city council remained the sole shareholder. Three UACs designated as “utilities” became responsible for the provision of “income-generating services”: Water and sanitation, electricity, and waste management. “Agencies” provide nontradable services like roads and stormwater, parks, and cemeteries. The municipality is no longer supposed to subsidize the UACs' budgets, except in the case of agencies, that do not generate income through direct user payments.Footnote ⁶¹ The logic of the plan was reminiscent of urban privatization in late Apartheid. The contracting out of services and the elimination of municipal cross-subsidization, in fact, minimized the council's obligations, while emphasizing the role of user payments in financing the new corporatized entities.Footnote ⁶²

To assuage popular concern, the GJMC referred iGoli 2002 to a process of consultation with civil society and labor organizations, lasting until August 1999. This consultation culminated in an “iGoli summit” that included the participation of more than 200 representatives from business, civil society, and government.Footnote ⁶³

In presenting the plan to SAMWU, city manager Khetso Gordhan stated the basic thrust of iGoli 2002:

Gordhan, therefore, presented his grudging alignment with Thatcherism not as a matter of ideological adherence to neoliberalism and privatization, but as a second-best solution made necessary by the city's disastrous fiscal crisis.

Nonetheless, SAMWU denounced iGoli 2002 as an undemocratic process that, “in the style of old apartheid politicians,” denied a “transformation of the city in a way that will benefit the poor.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Opposition to iGoli 2002 quickly became a centerpiece of SAMWU's “antiprivatization campaign.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The union's discourse combined fear for its members' wages and employment with concerns for the living conditions of the poor. It therefore resurrected the typical social movement unionism theme of workplace-community solidarity:

Negotiations on iGoli 2002 between SAMWU and the GJMC started in February 1999. On April 6, SAMWU demanded a two-month moratorium on the implementation of the plan, which the GJMC accepted only if limited to labor-related issues. In May SAMWU demanded suspending the implementation of the plan while negotiations were in progress. The August 1999 “iGoli summit,” boycotted by SAMWU, concluded however that sufficient consultation had been achieved, and on September 27 the municipality adopted an iGoli 2002 Transformation and Implementation Plan. On October 10 SAMWU declared a formal dispute. The stalemate in negotiations ended on October 26, when SAMWU went on strike demanding a moratorium on the plan. The police intervened, beating demonstrating strikers.Footnote ⁶⁸

By then, left ANC councilors had also started opposing iGoli 2002, shaking the party's superficial unanimity in support of the plan. The councilor for Pimville (Soweto) Trevor Ngwane, was expelled from the party after attacking iGoli 2002 as part of the government's neoliberal agenda. The issue of municipal restructuring proved controversial for allies of the ANC, like the South African Communist Party, whose Johannesburg branch supported the SAMWU dispute. In January 2000, the national ANC leadership decided to intervene directly in an attempt to mediate between SAMWU and the GJMC.Footnote ⁶⁹

SAMWU decided to strengthen links with ANC and communist dissenters, social movements, and civil society organizations that were also opposing privatization. Since the end of the 1990s, opposition to municipal privatization in the country's main urban areas had led to the formation of local community movements, “citizens' forums,” and “crisis committees.” Most of their members came from vulnerable, unorganized sectors of the community, like unemployed youth and elderly on government welfare grants. Usually not represented in institutional negotiations, these organizations focused their tactics on mass demonstrations and direct action. For example, they “illegally” reconnected water and electricity for residents disconnected due to nonpayment.Footnote ⁷⁰ In May 2000 SAMWU, local Communist Party activists, left student groups, and antiprivatization community movements convened an anti-iGoli forum in Johannesburg.Footnote ⁷¹ From the forum came, on September 23, the launch of the Antiprivatisation Forum, a coordinating body of local social movements, political organizations, and unions. The forum had branches in about twenty townships around Johannesburg, and former ANC councilor Ngwane was its most visible leader.

Backed by social movement support, SAMWU staged a two-day strike on November 15–16, and on November 30 it went on strike indefinitely. The council adopted a repressive stance and threatened to dismiss all the strikers under provisions in the Labour Relations Act that prohibit strikes in “essential services.” The municipality also did not authorize SAMWU marches, and started proceedings to lay charges on the union for damages incurred in the mid-November strike. On December 4, one day before the local government elections, SAMWU decided to “suspend” the strike in an attempt to start negotiations with the municipality to agree on minimum essential services by the end of the month.Footnote ⁷² While negotiations proved inconclusive, national political events militated against a resumption of the strike. The ANC won a large majority in the December 5 municipal elections, also thanks to COSATU's support. As a COSATU member, SAMWU was bound to politically endorse the ANC. A SAMWU strike against the ANC-run municipality of the country's largest city was therefore highly inconvenient for the COSATU-ANC alliance. Moreover, January 1, 2001 was the date set by iGoli 2002 for the commencement of the new corporatized services. The date arrived without SAMWU and the municipality reaching an agreement on essential services. Faced with the actual implementation of the plan it had tried to stop, SAMWU let resuming the strike quietly fall off its agenda.

Many factors converge to explain the defeat of SAMWU's opposition to iGoli 2002. The GJMC's unilateralism in implementing the plan has tended from the beginning to marginalize the union as an influential voice.Footnote ⁷³ SAMWU's Johannesburg organizer, Hlubi Byiana, feels that the municipality confined the union to a “rubberstamping” role by fast-tracking a plan whose complexity and technical sophistication exceeded SAMWU's limited resources and skills.Footnote ⁷⁴ Emerging from a history of radical opposition to racist authoritarianism, SAMWU was at a loss in responding to municipal restructuring under a democratically elected government. Its alliance, as a COSATU affiliate, with the ANC at the national level weakened the position of its Johannesburg branch as well as the union's principled stand against privatization. David Lier and Kristian StokkeFootnote ⁷⁵ convincingly argue that social-movement unionism, successful in the struggle against apartheid, has significant limitations in a political alliance such as that of COSATU-ANC, where unions can no longer play an exclusively oppositional role.

Finally, SAMWU's opposition to iGoli 2002 revealed divisions and contradictions in the union's strategies. At root these revolved around whether the union's most effective role is to contest broad social policies, or to manage them primarily in the interest of its members. SAMWU's Gauteng provincial office pressed for a pragmatic approach that prioritized negotiations over jobs and benefits in the post-iGoli municipality. As Byiana puts it, “as a trade union, we are reformist,” which essentially means that:

This pragmatism, to the point of conceding SAMWU's principled opposition to corporatization, markedly contrasts with the rhetoric deployed by top union officials. During the aborted Johannesburg strike, SAMWU's general secretary, Roger Ronnie, argued that

In the end, as SAMWU research officer, Rob Rees, noted, while the union's headquarters deployed traditional social movement unionism and antiprivatization rhetoric, Johannesburg local offices chose an economistic course focused on members' wages and jobs. Pressures from the ANC helped tilt the balance of power in this latter direction: The ruling party was alarmed by the convergence of union rank-and-file radicalism and antigovernment social movements.Footnote ⁷⁸ The leadership of COSATU also opposed social movements like the Antiprivatisation Forum, which it accused of ultraleftist “adventurism” and preconceived ideological opposition to the ANC government.Footnote ⁷⁹

Further constraining SAMWU's radicalism are probably its growing difficulties in representing a changing municipal workforce. The 1997–2000 freeze on permanent hiring accelerated trends towards more contingent and casualized employment. In the service that traditionally employs most casual workers, waste management, their share of the total headcount jumped from 36.6 percent in 1998 to almost 50 percent by the end of 1999.Footnote ⁸⁰ SAMWU does not represent significant numbers of nonpermanent employees. Approximately seventy percent of SAMWU's GJMC members are located in low-wage, low-skill hourly occupations. Less than ten percent, however, are in fixed-term contracts, while casuals are basically absent.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, SAMWU's opposition to casualization may contradict demands of community residents for whom casual municipal jobs, for example in refuse collection, often represent the only employment chance.Footnote ⁸² Once more, the defense of members' status sits uneasily with the union's social movement rhetoric.

By 2005, as a result of the establishment of corporatized services, only 6,000 of the 25,000 members of SAMWU's Johannesburg branch were directly employed by the Johannesburg municipality. The rest fell under corporatized utilities and agencies, whose managers have shown a growing opposition to bargain collectively over wages and working conditions.Footnote ⁸³ SAMWU remains the largest local government union in South Africa, with 55.9 percent of the total workforce, and 70 percent of GJMC employees, among its members. From the late 1990s, however, its membership has started to decline. As possible explanations the Secretariat Report to SAMWU's 2003 congress mentions a growing “lack of appeal” for militant and political unionism, and the attractiveness of legal centers and service organizations as alternative ways to protect jobs and benefits.Footnote ⁸⁴ More research is needed on the impact of privatization on negative membership trends. They seem however to confirm a deep crisis of social movement unionism as a means to mobilize municipal workers in a rapidly liberalizing context.