The victory of the 1,224 Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) workers did not drop from the heavens in the form of a CCMA arbitration award. It was prepared over years of organisation and struggle in which workers learnt, through their own experience, how collective action could overcome the isolation and insecurity imposed upon them by precarious employment. Article 1 of this series explained what was won and the political conditions that gave rise to the campaign. This second article turns to the making of the struggle itself and the lessons it offers for rebuilding the fighting capacity of the working class.
The central lesson is straightforward: a campaign has to be built. Anger provides its fuel; organisation gives it direction and staying power. The grievances of EPWP workers were widespread, but common grievances become a material force only when workers organise around common demands, establish democratic structures through which they can act collectively, and develop a strategy capable of bringing sufficient pressure to bear upon those responsible for their conditions.
For precarious workers this task is particularly difficult. Their insecurity is itself a weapon in the hands of the employer. Temporary contracts hang over workers like a sword of Damocles; the army of unemployed outside the workplace reinforces the threat of replacement; dispersed workplaces fragment workers who share the same conditions. The very employment system that creates the grievance therefore erects obstacles to organising against it.
The EPWP campaign had to overcome these obstacles.
From scattered grievances to collective organisation
The workers began by building their own democratic structures. Meetings brought together workers who had previously experienced their conditions individually and gave them the opportunity to formulate common demands, elect representatives and determine the direction of the campaign. Through these structures the workers began to acquire the most important weapon available to the working class: confidence in their own collective strength.
This was central to the approach of the Marxist Workers Party. The MWP’s task was to assist the workers to develop the organisational strength and political understanding necessary to conduct their own struggle. Political discussion, organisation and action were therefore inseparable. Each mobilisation tested the campaign’s strategy; every advance and setback provided lessons; those lessons could then be generalised and used to prepare the next stage of struggle.
This is how workers learn in struggle. A demonstration can teach lessons about the state that no lecture can convey. An occupation poses in practice the question of who has the right to determine what happens in a public institution. The experience of electing and holding representatives accountable demonstrates the superiority of workers’ democracy over decisions made above their heads. Through such experiences workers begin to see themselves differently: as part of a class with interests and power of its own.
The campaign consequently developed through action. Workers marched, demonstrated, held mass meetings and occupied the Gauteng Department of Infrastructure Development. They took their demands beyond departmental offices and ultimately to the seat of government at the Union Buildings. These mobilisations were instruments for applying pressure, but they were also schools of struggle in which workers accumulated organisational experience and tested their collective strength.
Unity had to extend beyond the EPWP
The campaign also recognised that the conditions confronting EPWP workers were shared by other layers of precarious workers. The struggle of Community Health Workers (CHWs) was particularly important. Their fight for permanent employment had already demonstrated that workers trapped for years in supposedly temporary employment could break through the barriers erected between precarious and permanent workers.
The attempt to bring EPWP workers and CHWs together therefore carried enormous potential. A joint march to the Union Buildings and the subsequent effort to extend the campaign through a rally in the Eastern Cape pointed towards the kind of united movement required to confront precarious employment nationally.
That potential was never fully realised. The campaign was unable to consolidate these initiatives into the sustained national mobilisation that the situation demanded. This weakness matters because the state does not confront precarious workers as separate categories. EPWP, CHW and Community Works Programme workers, outsourced cleaners, security workers and other casualised layers are products of the same restructuring of employment. Their struggles therefore possess a common foundation.
The lesson remains: the fragmentation created by precarious employment must be answered by the unity of precarious workers in struggle.
Bringing the trade union movement into the campaign
The relationship between the campaign and NUPSAW provides another important lesson.
The EPWP workers had already been dismissed when the MWP approached NUPSAW and proposed that the union admit them under a special dispensation and take up their case. This was an important decision. The traditional conception that unions organise those currently occupying recognised workplaces in permanent jobs, leaves vast layers of the modern working class beyond the reach of organised labour.
The neoliberal restructuring of employment has made this division between permanent unionised workers and precarious unorganised workers increasingly untenable. Outsourcing, labour broking, temporary contracts and programmes such as the EPWP fragment workers who share the same class interests, weakening the conditions through which collective organisation and class consciousness develop. These schemes also enable the state to deny precarious workers rights and benefits won through earlier struggles and collective bargaining. A worker’s employment status may change; their class position does not. A worker does not cease to belong to the working class because a contract expires.
The MWP programme has long argued for the principle “once a member, always a member”, for retrenched workers to retain their union membership and democratic rights, and for the trade union movement to organise the unemployed. It also calls for workplace, industry and sector-wide action committees capable of uniting workers across different unions and those outside them.
The experience of the EPWP campaign gives concrete substance to this approach. NUPSAW’s decision to admit the dismissed workers and provide the legal representation that ultimately secured the CCMA award demonstrated what is possible when a union crosses the artificial boundary between permanent workers and the precariat. The union gave the workers access to institutional and legal resources they could not have commanded individually. The campaign, in turn, brought into the union a layer of workers whom conventional trade union practice might have abandoned once they lost their jobs.
But the experience also reveals how much more could have been achieved. The MWP persuaded the NUPSAW leadership to build on its earlier victory of the Community Health Workers employed by the Gauteng Department of Health. The CHW workers had won their demand for permanent jobs at the Public Health and Social Development Sectoral Bargaining Council following a campaign combining legal and mass action including the occupation of then MEC for Health, Aaron Motsoaledi’s offices. The victory meant the admission of the CHWs onto the public sector payroll and eligibility for the wages and benefits agreed by collective bargaining. The victory was boosted by the fact that NUPSAW had demanded that CHW wages be raised beyond entry level to level 5. This meant a quadrupling of wages from R2500 per month to approximately R7 500. It also meant workers were now eligible for benefits such as membership of the Government Employees Medical Scheme, housing, maternity and paternity leave etc.
Unfortunately, NUPSAW’s intervention suffered from serious shortcomings. The leadership did not fully grasp the implications of the Gauteng CHW victory and the possibility it posed for challenging the slave-labour scheme more broadly. The excellent idea of a ‘Do Like Gauteng’ campaign could have been based on a principle the labour movement has fought for internationally – equal pay for work of equal value – but it was implemented at best half-heartedly. NUPSAW agreed to the EPWP workers’ proposal to organise the successful occupation of the Union Buildings precinct and march of precarious workers. Yet the leadership required the EPWP workers, whose slave wages of R2,500 a month had just been terminated by dismissal on the eve of the Covid-19 lockdown, to contribute R40,000 towards the R90,000 cost of hiring buses for the event. The seriousness and determination of the workers was demonstrated when they raised the money in less than two weeks.
The campaign furthermore concentrated primarily on the legal case. The MWP and the workers continued to carry much of the organising and administrative burden required to sustain the campaign, including the painstaking work of assembling and maintaining the workers’ records required for the case. The wider mobilisation envisaged when NUPSAW entered the campaign—uniting EPWP workers with CHWs and extending the struggle into other provinces—failed to develop to its full potential.
This is not a minor organisational detail. It goes to the heart of the crisis facing the trade union movement.
The courts are a terrain of struggle, not a substitute for it
The CCMA award vindicates the decision to pursue every available legal avenue. Workers should use rights won through previous struggles and defend them against every attempt by the employers and government to erode them. But legal institutions reflect the balance of forces in society; they cannot substitute for the organised power of the working class.
The campaign was strongest when legal action formed one component of a wider strategy of organisation, mobilisation and political pressure. Had the organisational momentum been maintained and extended—had the attempted unity between EPWP workers and CHWs been consolidated, the campaign spread nationally and the organised strength of the trade union movement thrown behind the demand for insourcing—the balance of forces confronting government could have been considerably stronger.
This is important when assessing the six months’ compensation awarded by the CCMA. The workers’ principal demand was permanent employment. The unbearable pressure of unemployment and the length of a campaign that endured, in the end, for seven years had understandably drained the workers’ stamina. Accordingly, they downgraded the legal team’s mandate from demanding reinstatement and permanent jobs to compensation. The legal principle behind the workers’ argument – that the repeated renewal of their contracts over periods of as much as seven years proved that the jobs they performed were permanent and that they should therefore have been employed permanently – was never tested. It may not have been won, but nor was it lost. It remains there to be challenged in future struggles while the EPWP programme and its offshoots remain in place.
The partial character of the victory should therefore become a source of political education. It demonstrates both what sustained struggle achieved and what remained beyond its reach because the necessary balance of forces was never fully assembled.
There were weaknesses within the EPWP side of the campaign itself. Problems of leadership and accountability emerged. The MWP also had to confront difficulties within its own intervention, including the conduct of the comrade entrusted with important campaign responsibilities. Revolutionary organisations have no immunity from the pressures of capitalist society. Their advantage lies in possessing democratic structures, political principles and collective accountability through which such problems can be confronted. Article 1 dealt with the subsequent expulsion of the former campaign leader and the Party’s rejection of his attempts to extract money from workers.
These experiences form part of the political balance sheet of the struggle. A movement that records only its successes condemns itself to repeat its mistakes.
Organising the unorganised can rebuild the unions
South Africa’s trade union movement confronts declining membership, fragmentation and a widening gulf between organised workers and the millions condemned to insecure employment and unemployment. The answer lies among the very layers that have too often been treated as peripheral to organised labour.
The EPWP campaign offers a glimpse of another road.
Imagine the organisational power that could be assembled if the unions systematically organised EPWP, CWP, CHW, ECD, outsourced and labour-broker workers; retained retrenched workers within their structures; organised unemployed workers in working-class communities; and united these layers with permanently employed workers around common demands. The decline of trade union organisation could begin to be reversed while simultaneously overcoming the divisions that employers deliberately cultivate between permanent and precarious workers.
This requires a return to the traditions upon which the strongest periods of the South African labour movement were built: workers’ control, democratic organisation, class independence, mass mobilisation and the understanding that the strength of a union ultimately resides in the conscious organisation of its members. The MWP’s programme calls for a revolutionary trade unionism that links workers’ day-to-day struggles to the struggle for the socialist transformation of society.
The EPWP workers have provided a small but important demonstration of what this means in practice. Workers scattered by precarious employment organised themselves. They sustained their struggle after dismissal. They marched, occupied and mobilised. They brought a trade union into their struggle. They used the legal avenues available to them. Seven years later, the state was forced to retreat.
The Marxist Workers Party calls on organised and unorganised workers to unite in rebuilding the trade unions as genuine organs of working-class power. This requires opening union structures to precarious and retrenched workers, rebuilding democratic accountability from below, and organising around common demands across the divisions imposed by different forms of employment.
The organised and unorganised workers, together with the trade unions, should immediately consider the following:
- Join and recruit: encourage EPWP and waiting-list workers to join a union and set concrete recruitment targets.
- Form joint action committees: create local committees that include EPWP, CHW, CWP, labour-broker/contract workers and permanent employees to coordinate demands and actions.
- Defend membership rights: push unions to adopt and implement “once a member, always a member” policies.
- Demand democratic accountability: campaign for regular, transparent elections and recall mechanisms for shop stewards and leaders.
The task now is to generalise those lessons.
The millions of precarious and unorganised workers are not a burden standing outside the trade union movement. They are a vast reserve of working-class power waiting to be organised.
Next in the EPWP Victory Series
In Article 3 we place the campaign within the wider offensive against permanent employment: from GEAR and outsourcing to the expansion of EPWP and other forms of precarious labour, and the struggles—from #OutsourcingMustFall to the Community Health Workers—that demonstrated the possibilities for resistance.