Editorial Note
The victory of the 1,224 EPWP workers before the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) belongs to the entire working class. Although the workers secured only a partial victory, their struggle demonstrated that organised workers, united around common demands and sustained through democratic organisation, can compel even the state to retreat. This four-part series examines what was won, why the struggle matters, how the campaign was built and the lessons it holds for millions of workers confronting outsourcing, casualisation and precarious employment throughout South Africa.
The EPWP Victory: How Organised Workers Forced the State to Retreat
The arbitration award recently handed down by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) in favour of 1,224 former Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) workers marks an important milestone in one of the longest and most determined struggles waged by precarious workers in democratic South Africa. The Commission found that the Gauteng Department of Infrastructure Development had unfairly dismissed the workers and ordered compensation equivalent to six months’ remuneration. The workers did not, however, secure their principal demand, namely permanent employment through insourcing. The award therefore represents a partial victory: an important concession wrested from the state through years of determined struggle, while the central demand for permanent public employment remains before the working class.
The significance of this struggle extends far beyond the compensation awarded by the CCMA. More than a thousand workers, dismissed from their jobs and scattered across Gauteng, sustained a united campaign over six years and compelled the state to acknowledge that it had acted unlawfully. Their experience demonstrates that precarious workers are neither powerless nor condemned to permanent insecurity. Organisation, political clarity and collective action can shift the balance of forces and compel concessions even from an employer as powerful as the state.
The lessons of this campaign belong to every worker employed on temporary contracts, through labour brokers, community employment programmes and outsourced companies. They belong to Community Health Workers, Community Works Programme workers, Early Childhood Development workers, contract cleaners, security workers and every other section of the working class whose labour is permanent but whose employment remains insecure. The struggle of the EPWP workers confirms a simple truth that every generation of workers has had to rediscover through its own experience: when workers organise themselves democratically around common demands, they become a social force capable of changing the conditions under which they live and work.
The EPWP Was the Product of a Political Choice
The Expanded Public Works Programme emerged from a definite political and economic trajectory pursued by the ANC government following the adoption of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme in 1996. Presented as a strategy for economic growth, fiscal discipline and job creation, GEAR accelerated outsourcing, privatisation, labour flexibility and cuts in public expenditure. Permanent public-sector employment gave way to increasingly insecure forms of work while responsibility for delivering essential public services was progressively transferred to outsourced companies and temporary employment programmes.
South Africa entered democracy carrying enormous backlogs in housing, healthcare, education, roads and public infrastructure. A democratic government committed to meeting these needs required a significant expansion of permanent public-sector employment. Instead, permanent posts disappeared or remained frozen while outsourcing expanded and increasing numbers of workers were employed through private contractors and programmes such as the EPWP on what the workers themselves aptly described throughout the campaign as slave wages and slave conditions. Temporary employment programmes became a permanent feature of the public service across national, provincial and local government, reproducing within the democratic state the insecurity that had become characteristic of the private sector.
These policies produced a contradiction that grew sharper with every passing year. Government departments depended every day upon the labour of EPWP workers to maintain schools, repair public buildings, maintain roads and perform countless other tasks essential to the functioning of the public service. The work remained permanent. Government’s demand for that work remained permanent. Only the workers themselves remained temporary.
From these material conditions emerged the central demand of the campaign:
Work of a permanent nature must be performed by permanently employed workers.
This demand expressed far more than the immediate interests of the EPWP workers. It challenged a model of public-sector restructuring that reduced labour costs by transferring the burden of insecurity onto the working class. It asserted the principle that decent public services cannot be built upon permanent insecurity and that workers performing permanent work are entitled to permanent employment, decent wages and the full rights enjoyed by every public servant.
Every Period Produces Its Own Resistance
The working class has never accepted exploitation without resistance. Every offensive by capital and the state generates new forms of struggle through which workers seek to defend their livelihoods and advance their interests. The campaign against outsourcing on university campuses, carried forward through the #OutsourcingMustFall movement, demonstrated that organised workers and students could force institutions to retreat from outsourcing. Community Health Workers carried the struggle into the public health sector and secured important advances towards permanent employment, establishing a precedent that strengthened confidence among EPWP workers that insourcing was both a legitimate and an achievable demand. Important questions remain unresolved for Community Health Workers, but their struggle demonstrated that organised workers could compel government to retreat and that every gain won by one section of the working class strengthens the confidence of others.
The EPWP workers entered their struggle with these experiences behind them. They understood that precarious employment was neither inevitable nor permanent. It had been created through political decisions and could therefore be challenged through political struggle. The decisive question was organisation. Common grievances had to become common demands. Scattered workers had to become an organised movement. Temporary workers had to discover the collective power that lay hidden beneath their individual insecurity.
Building the Campaign
Every sustained workers’ struggle requires organisation, leadership and institutions capable of carrying the struggle forward. The first achievement of the campaign therefore lay in the patient work of bringing workers together, developing democratic worker structures, electing accountable representatives and forging unity around a common programme of action. These organisational gains proved to be every bit as important as the legal victory eventually secured before the CCMA.
Recognising both the potential and the limitations of a campaign conducted outside the organised trade union movement, the Marxist Workers Party approached NUPSAW with a proposal that the union organise the dismissed workers admitting them as members under a special dispensation. The union accepted that challenge and ultimately carried the legal case that resulted in the arbitration award.
The campaign therefore drew strength from the complementary contributions of the workers themselves, their democratic organisations, the political intervention of the Marxist Workers Party and the legal representation provided by NUPSAW. Each fulfilled a distinct responsibility. Together they transformed a group of dismissed workers into an organised force capable of sustaining occupations, demonstrations, marches, legal proceedings and a six-year campaign that compelled the state to retreat.
Defending the Victory
Every important victory of the working class creates new opportunities, but it also imposes new responsibilities. Victories belong to the workers who built them through collective sacrifice and struggle. They do not belong to individuals. They cannot become private property. Every attempt to appropriate a collective victory for personal gain weakens the solidarity upon which the workers’ movement depends.
It is for this reason that the Marxist Workers Party and NUPSAWU consider it necessary to warn workers about attempts currently being made to exploit this victory for personal enrichment. The Party and the union have received reports that Executive Mukwevho, the former leader of the campaign, has been demanding R300 from workers on the false pretext that the money is required to recover expenses allegedly incurred during the struggle. These claims are entirely false and must be rejected.
The record of the campaign speaks for itself.
During the period in which Executive served as the public leader of the campaign, the Marxist Workers Party paid him a monthly stipend to enable him to devote his time to organising the struggle. The Party also provided political leadership, organisational support and administrative capacity throughout the campaign. When the campaign reached the stage where legal intervention became necessary, NUPSAW agreed to organise the dismissed workers under a special dispensation, appointed legal representatives and carried the arbitration to its successful conclusion. Throughout the struggle, the workers themselves contributed collectively to sustaining the campaign and repeatedly made personal sacrifices in order to continue the fight.
No individual financed this struggle. No individual owns this victory. No individual has any right to demand payment from the workers whose determination made this victory possible. The MWP therefore condemns these actions as an act of extortion and as a betrayal of the principles of collective solidarity upon which the campaign was built. Workers should reject these demands and immediately report any attempt to solicit money in the name of the campaign to either the Party or NUPSAW. The victory belongs collectively to the workers and must remain their collective achievement.
The Party also considers it necessary to clarify one further matter. Executive Mukwevho is no longer a member of the Marxist Workers Party. He was expelled from the organisation approximately two years ago after the Party concluded disciplinary proceedings arising from serious acts of gender-based violence committed against his former wife. His actions in attempting to extract money from workers have no connection whatsoever with the Marxist Workers Party or with the principles upon which this campaign was conducted.
The workers’ movement has always understood that organisation depends upon democratic accountability, collective leadership and political integrity. These principles guided the EPWP campaign from its inception. They remain the surest defence against every attempt to substitute personal ambition for collective struggle.
A Partial Victory and an Unfinished Struggle
The arbitration award closes an important chapter in the history of the EPWP campaign. It does not conclude the struggle that gave rise to it.
The central demand that permanent work should be performed by permanently employed workers remains unresolved. Millions of workers continue to labour under conditions of outsourcing, casualisation and precarious employment created by the neoliberal restructuring of the South African economy. The struggle against those conditions continues in every workplace where workers organise to defend their livelihoods and their dignity.
The experience of the EPWP workers demonstrates that organisation changes the balance of forces. Workers dismissed from their jobs, deprived of their incomes and dispersed across workplaces transformed themselves into an organised movement capable of compelling the state to retreat. The compensation awarded by the CCMA represents only one measure of that achievement. The greater victory lies in the experience accumulated through six years of collective struggle, democratic organisation and political perseverance. That experience now becomes part of the common inheritance of the South African working class.
The task before the labour movement is to carry these lessons into every workplace where precarious or insecure workers remain unorganised. Every union confronting declining membership should ask what this campaign teaches about organising temporary workers. Every community of EPWP workers should ask how similar campaigns can be built elsewhere. Every socialist should ask how political organisation can strengthen workers’ struggles.
Every retreat forced upon the state strengthens the confidence of the working class for the battles that lie ahead.
Next in the EPWP Victory Series
Building a Campaign from Below
How did 1,224 dismissed workers sustain a six-year struggle against the state? How were democratic worker structures built? Why did the Marxist Workers Party approach NUPSAW, and what role did the union play in carrying the legal struggle forward? What lessons does this campaign hold for organising millions of precarious workers throughout South Africa?