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Labour's
Past, Present and Future - 'Progress' in Zimbabwe Conference
Amanda
Atwood, Kubatana.net
November 08, 2010
'Progress' in
Zimbabwe Conference index
page
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Speaker:
Brian Raftopoulos
Discussants: Hamadziripi Tamukamoyo, Kumbirai Kundenga, Tapiwa Chagonda
Brian Raftopoulos opened
the discussion by looking at the ways in which the state has constructed
the labour question from 1980-2010. He noted that Bulawayo was the
cradle of trade unionism, and that the formation of the labour unions
came out of the past relationship of labour with ZAPU.
During the 1980s,
Raftopoulos noted, there were different messages coming out of the
state, including Zanu PF's combined strategy of substituting
its own labour centre for a more established trade union tradition,
culminating in the creation of the ZCTU.
Secondly, the ruling party's attack on legacies of the Rhodesian
industrial relations system, and also attacks on ZAPU within the
labour department. But at the same time, there are emerging calls
for a greater productivity of labour, and a normalisation of industrial
relations, trying to get to a context in which wage bargaining and
collective bargaining can begin to establish.
Listen
The 1990s, Raftopoulos
said, were a liberalisation period in which a normalised industrial
relations system was established. Then in the post-2000 period,
there was a breakdown of institutionalised forms of labour and governmentality,
and a strong repressive position taken by the state towards the
labour movement. The post Global
Political Agreement phase, Raftopolous said, has looked at the
difficulties of trying to normalise labour relations again.
Raftopoulos
also discussed the ways trade unionists have tried to use an industrial
relations discourse in order to avoid political intervention. In
other words, they try to use a moderinist industrial relations framework
in order to stop the state from intervening politically in trade
union affairs. According to Raftopoulos, it is also clear that trade
unions in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, are very much children of the
Enlightenment - they are very much those who have pushed for
universal rights, and have often fought national repression through
a recourse to a call for universal rights. This makes some believe
that it has been incorporated into an imperialist framework, but
Raftopoulos wants to challenge that.
Listen
In the 2000s,
Raftopolous discussed, trade unions in Zimbabwe intensify their
international lobbying, resulting in the ILO
report of 2009. This report is very clear about what the state
has done. It says it saw a clear pattern of arrests, detention,
violence and torture of trade union leaders and members by the security
sector forces coinciding with ZCTU nation-wide events, indicating
some centralised direction to the security forces to take such action,
and a clear pattern of control over ZCTU trade union gatherings
through the application of POSA.
It noted the systematic targeting of ZCTU officials and members,
particularly in rural areas, involving significant violence and
anti-union discrimination in employment, in what appeared to be
a calculated attempt to intimidate and threaten ZCTU members.
So, Raftopoulos
noted, the lobbying and discourse of labour became very much about
judging the repressive state measures against labour against universal
standards, and using that to critique the internal state. This was
interpreted by some - such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros - as labour
becoming ensconced in a kind of cosmopolitan Western discourse.
Raftopoulos found this wrong on two scores. Firstly, it misses the
long historical precedent of this kind of discursive framework within
labour - it's not a new thing. Secondly, it assumes that because
there is some agreement between international positions and the
position of the labour movement in Zimbabwe, that the latter is
complicit with imperialism. This is to assume that that whole project
can be defined by how it is understood from outside, without looking
at the local dynamics which are generating and producing those particular
discourses.
Listen
During the discussion,
Hamadziripi Tamukamoyo asked what the potential was for agricultural
labour to provide a force for change in Zimbabwe's future.
If there was deindustrialisation, he noted, and the opening of agricultural
production, how would this impact on the labour movement, where
trade unions traditionally have been urban based. Also, he asked
if there was any potential for an organised informal sector labour
union. He also warned against glorifying the contribution of disapora-based
Zimbabweans. Those remittances, he argued, support the comprador
class. That money isn't going to the dispossessed, it's
supporting a consumer economy.
Kumbirai Kudenga, a trade
unionist since 1972, stated that the ZCTU created the MDC as a worker's
party, but that their mistake came in the first MDC congress, wherein
they allowed a mixed bag - business people, intellectuals,
lawyers, employers, farmers, and others into the leadership positions
of the MDC. These different players then compromised the progress
towards the workers' agenda by the MDC.
Commenting from
the floor, John Saul noted that the issues raised by Raftopolous
are being played out all over the world. One of Zanu PF's
strongest cards is that of black nationalism. There is strong support
among the black middle class elsewhere for this rhetoric. Saul mentioned
that Bill Fletcher, a leading black American trade unionist, has
written a number of articles on exactly this question. His piece
Some of my friends
are being tortured in Zimbabwe, is his attempt to bring more
critique from blacks outside the country to the regime in Zimbabwe.
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