The struggle of the Gauteng Expanded Public Works Programme workers did not arise from an accidental failure in the administration of a well-intentioned employment programme. The conditions against which they rebelled were the product of processes stretching back decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Workers were performing work that government required year after year. They maintained public buildings and infrastructure and carried out functions necessary for the provision of public services. Yet the workers themselves remained temporary. Contracts expired and were renewed; one group of workers could be replaced by another; wages remained at poverty levels; and workers performing work for the state were denied the employment security, wages and benefits enjoyed by permanently employed public servants. This contradiction lies at the heart of the EPWP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The work is permanent. The employment is temporary.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Understanding how this became possible requires us to place EPWP within the political settlement that ended apartheid and the subsequent restructuring of the South African economy and public sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the negotiated settlement to GEAR<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For the capitalist class in SA and internationally, the purpose of the negotiations that ended apartheid was to ensure that white minority rule was abolished whilst preserving the capitalist social and economic order upon which enormous inequalities of wealth and power rested. The negotiations, however, took place against the background of a mass movement in which important layers of the working class had drawn from their own experience of struggle the conclusion that the fight for national liberation was inseparable from the struggle for fundamental social and economic transformation \u2014 that is, against the capitalist system itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, whilst for the strategists of capital the aim of the negotiations was to save capitalism, for the guiding layers of workers and youth national liberation required its overthrow. These irreconcilable aims placed before the main classes in society a choice between revolution and counter-revolution. To achieve their aims, the capitalist class required a counter-revolution; to fulfil theirs, the working class required the revolution to proceed without interruption from the democratic to the socialist tasks \u2014 from the overthrow of white minority rule to the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The methods by which the strategists of capital had achieved their aims elsewhere \u2014 as in Chile in 1973, through a bloody CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government \u2014 were ruled out in SA. The mass movement of the 1980s had reached insurrectionary proportions despite the counter-revolutionary aims of state-sponsored so-called black-on-black violence and the unleashing of the state forces countrywide under the full State of Emergency imposed in 1986. Such a course risked guaranteeing the very outcome that had to be prevented at all costs: the overthrow of capitalism. The counter-revolution had to take a democratic form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The negotiated settlement was thus an act of containment \u2013 the neutering of the mass movement\u2019s revolutionary potential within the framework of a capitalist parliamentary democracy. Political power would be transferred to a government elected by the black majority, while the commanding heights of the economy remained in capitalist hands. Once the preservation of capitalist property relations formed the basis of the settlement, the economic aspirations raised through decades of struggle immediately came into collision with the requirements of the capitalist system the settlement had preserved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ANC\/SACP leadership\u2019s retreat in the face of this pressure from imperialism and domestic capital sealed the fate of the Freedom Charter. Its clauses providing for the transfer of the mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industry to the ownership of the people had expressed, however ambiguously, expectations that liberation would ensure the transfer of the economic power necessary to translate political power into concrete social emancipation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time of the transition \u2013 formally begun with the installation of the Transitional Executive Council in 1993 \u2013 the Freedom Charter\u2019s central demands had effectively been abandoned. The Reconstruction and Development Programme became the ANC’s manifesto for the 1994 election. It retained extensive promises of reconstruction and redistribution while leaving capitalist ownership of the economy intact. Even these limited expectations soon came into conflict with the neo-liberal capitalist economic framework consolidated after the settlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The abandonment of the RDP as a distinct programme and the adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy \u2014 GEAR \u2014 in 1996 therefore did not represent an abrupt change of economic policy. It continued the economic \u201creform\u201d already pursued under the apartheid regime through the Normative Economic Model, including the privatisation of Iscor, as the writing on the wall for white minority rule became increasingly clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GEAR gave programmatic expression to the logic of the capitalist settlement under the conditions then prevailing internationally. By the 1990s neoliberalism had become the dominant programme through which capitalism internationally sought to restore profitability and weaken gains won by organised labour: privatisation, liberalisation, fiscal restraint, attacks on public expenditure and the restructuring and casualisation of employment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n South Africa’s transition took place within this international capitalist order. The ruling class could no longer rely upon apartheid repression to contain a powerful and organised working class, while the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism had been averted through negotiation. The counter-revolution had therefore assumed a democratic form: the political institutions of apartheid were dismantled while capitalist ownership and economic power were entrenched during the transition. The social expectations generated by the struggle could now be disciplined increasingly through the market, fiscal policy and the restructuring of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GEAR was the economic programme appropriate to that settlement. Outsourcing, commercialisation, privatisation and the casualisation of labour became among the mechanisms through which its consequences were transmitted into the lives of workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EPWP institutionalised precarious public work<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Expanded Public Works Programme was launched nationally in 2004. Government presented it as a response to unemployment and poverty, combining temporary employment with training and skills development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The terminology through which the programme has been described is itself revealing. EPWP workers have repeatedly been described officially as \u201cparticipants\u201d<\/strong> or \u201cbeneficiaries\u201d<\/strong>, while government measures the programme through the number of \u201cwork opportunities\u201d<\/strong> it creates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But a worker maintaining a hospital, cleaning a public building, repairing infrastructure or providing a community service is neither receiving charity nor merely \u201cparticipating\u201d in a programme. Labour is being performed. Socially necessary work is being carried out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The language disguises the employment relationship. This became increasingly important as supposedly temporary programmes became permanent features of the state: governments and ministers changed, successive phases of EPWP came and went, and one group of workers replaced another while the work itself remained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than two decades after EPWP was launched, workers are still promised training, skills and pathways that will supposedly allow them eventually to progress into permanent employment or other economic activity. A programme presented as a temporary bridge into employment has itself become a permanent institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Poverty wages became a substitute for permanent employment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why the MWP has described EPWP as a slave-wage poverty-recycling scheme. Mass unemployment creates desperate competition for work. Government then offers temporary work at wages far below those required for a decent life and, when contracts expire, workers can be returned to unemployment while another layer is recruited from the same communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Poverty is therefore circulated rather than abolished: one worker moves temporarily from unemployment into poverty-wage employment and is then returned to unemployment as another takes their place. Government records another \u201cwork opportunity\u201d, while neither worker acquires permanent economic security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This system has another advantage for the employer: it fragments workers performing related functions into permanent employees, outsourced workers, labour-broker workers, EPWP workers and workers employed through other temporary schemes, imposing different wages, contracts and conditions upon workers whose labour may contribute to the same public service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Capital has always attempted to divide workers in order to weaken their collective power, and casualisation gives that strategy an institutional form. Employment insecurity increases competition between workers; the threat that one worker can be replaced by another disciplines those who remain; trade-union organisation becomes more difficult; and the conditions through which workers recognise their shared interests and combined power are deliberately weakened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n #OutsourcingMustFall showed struggle can reverse attacks on workers. Every attempt to fragment the working class eventually creates resistance. The university outsourcing struggles that culminated in #OutsourcingMustFall provided an important demonstration. Outsourced cleaners, security workers and other workers had spent years performing work essential to universities while receiving inferior wages and conditions because their employment had been placed behind the legal barrier of private contractors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The outsourcing system told them that the university was not their employer. Their struggle answered that fiction with the material reality of their labour. Workers organised with students and supporters and demanded insourcing. Universities that had insisted outsourcing was unavoidable were compelled to retreat. The struggle demonstrated an important principle: employment arrangements created through neoliberal restructuring can be overturned through organised mass action.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The political significance extended beyond university campuses. Workers elsewhere could see that employment relationships presented as permanent facts of economic life were, in reality, the outcome of a balance of class forces\u2014and that a changed balance of forces could change them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is with this understanding that the Marxist Workers Party (known at the time as the Workers and Socialist Party) played its leading role in the #OMF struggle. We understood that it was necessary to break down the barriers outsourcing creates between workers employed permanently and those employed precariously. Permanent workers have the protection of labour laws, including the right to belong to a union and the rights derived from it, while precarious workers are frequently denied in practice the full benefit of collective bargaining over wages and conditions such as maternity leave, overtime pay and medical aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The system of precarious work is a strategy of divide-and-rule, using the threat of precarity against permanent workers to coerce them into accepting slave wages and conditions to the detriment of all workers \u2014 permanent and precarious alike. It was therefore necessary to demand collective bargaining rights and secure the support of unionised workers for this and all other demands under the slogan: an injury to one is an injury to all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n #OMF\u2019s struggle in Tshwane won an unprecedented victory after a three-week unprotected strike, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Community Health Workers carried the lesson into the public sector. The struggle of Community Health Workers led by the National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers (NUPSAW) developed the lesson further. CHWs performed indispensable and continuing work within the public health system while remaining trapped for years in insecure employment. Their work did not disappear when their contracts expired: communities continued to require healthcare and the health system continued to depend upon their labour. Their demand for permanent employment therefore struck at the same contradiction confronting EPWP workers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Government relied upon permanent work while refusing permanent employment to the workers performing it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The advances won by CHWs in Gauteng demonstrated that this contradiction could be challenged. Their absorption onto the public payroll, accompanied by significant improvements in wages and access to public-sector benefits, showed that precarious employment was neither inevitable nor irreversible. It also broke down the barriers between permanent and precarious workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the developing EPWP campaign, this was enormously important: workers could point to another layer of precarious public workers who had fought and forced government to retreat. The possibility existed to link these struggles\u2014to unite CHWs, EPWP workers and other precarious workers around the demand that permanent work must mean permanent jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Article 2 explained, that potential was only partially realised, but the strategic lesson remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same offensive has entered the private sector by another door<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The fragmentation of employment is not confined to government. Across the private sector, permanent employment has increasingly been eroded through outsourcing, labour broking, casualisation, fixed-term contracts and various forms of supposedly temporary employment. In retail and other sectors, workers can remain \u201ctemporary\u201d for extended periods while performing work that is plainly permanent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Government and private capital therefore arrive at the same destination through different routes, with the former setting the example and providing legitimacy for the latter. The state calls workers \u201cparticipants\u201d and \u201cbeneficiaries\u201d; private employers call them casuals, contractors or temporary workers. Behind the terminology stands the same class objective: secure access to labour while minimising the obligations owed to the worker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result is to shift economic insecurity downwards: employers obtain flexibility while workers carry the risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Labour broking: profiting from precarity<\/p>\n\n\n\n Labour broking adds another parasitic layer to this system. The worker performs the labour in the client\u2019s workplace, but a temporary employment service stands between worker and client and is paid for supplying that labour. The broker does not create the work being performed; its business rests on turning the employment relationship itself into a source of revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For workers already surviving on low wages, this intermediation deepens the contradiction. Money is spent remunerating an intermediary while the workers whose labour sustains the workplace remain on inferior wages, benefits and employment conditions. Labour broking therefore does more than obscure who bears responsibility for the worker: it creates a commercial interest in maintaining the very insecurity from which the broker profits. The demand to abolish labour broking and insource workers is consequently inseparable from the fight for permanent work, permanent employment and equal conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The attack on public-sector workers serves the same purpose<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The rationale offered by the capitalist class for the austerity that drives GEAR is that reducing corporate taxation increases the share of profits available to capital and will therefore encourage investment and job creation. A similar rationale was used in the negotiations to relax exchange controls, enabling the bosses to move increased amounts of money offshore. Corporate tax has declined from 52% of annual profits in 1992 to 27% today, yet Gross Fixed Capital Formation \u2014 a measure of investment \u2014 is down to the same level as in 1946, while unemployment has increased to 13 million, amongst the highest levels in the world. The loss of corporate tax revenue has contributed to a chronic budget deficit, compelling government to borrow from domestic and international money markets. Servicing that debt is the fastest-rising item in the budget and consumes 22 cents in every rand; avoiding default has consequently become a priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this reason there is a relentless ideological campaign against the public-sector wage bill. Public servants are routinely portrayed as a drain upon state finances: their wages as excessive, their numbers as bloated and their conditions as privileges society can no longer afford. They are told to take home less pay so that government can service the debt owed to the financial sharks \u2014 the mashonisa \u2014 in the money markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The argument against the public-sector wage bill turns reality upside down. South Africa confronts enormous shortages and backlogs in education, healthcare, housing, municipal services and public infrastructure, while millions are unemployed and socially necessary work remains undone. The rational solution would be to put the unemployed to work meeting society\u2019s needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Capitalist austerity demands the opposite: constrain expenditure, hold down the public-sector wage bill and find cheaper forms through which necessary work can nevertheless be performed. EPWP fits this contradiction perfectly, allowing the state to claim that it is creating employment while avoiding the permanent public-sector jobs required to address unemployment and the crisis of public services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This contradiction also creates the basis for a wider struggle. Workers whose employment is made precarious and working-class communities whose services are allowed to deteriorate confront different consequences of the same policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A clinic that needs additional workers may stand in a community where thousands are unemployed; schools and public buildings require maintenance while workers with the experience to perform that work rotate between temporary employment and unemployment; communities need functioning infrastructure while those who build and maintain it are denied permanent jobs. The shortage is neither of human need nor of people willing to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The struggle for permanent employment can therefore be linked directly to the struggle to rebuild public services. EPWP workers, Community Health Workers, outsourced workers, permanent public servants, unemployed workers and working-class communities have a material basis upon which to organise together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This does not mean that every group of workers will have identical demands. Workers can organise from the concrete conditions of their own sectors, formulate demands capable of mobilising those around them, and connect these struggles through a common programme against precarious employment and austerity. Health workers, education workers, municipal workers and other layers can build campaigns around their particular conditions while uniting around the principle that work of a permanent nature must be performed by permanently employed workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Permanent work demands permanent jobs<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The EPWP struggle therefore raises a question much larger than the fate of one group of workers. What kind of public sector does the working class need?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The MWP rejects a public service constructed upon layers of workers with different rights and conditions. A nurse, Community Health Worker, cleaner, administrator, maintenance worker or infrastructure worker performing socially necessary and continuing work should enjoy secure employment, a living wage, full labour rights and access to the benefits won through collective struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The principle is simple:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Work of a permanent nature must be performed by permanently employed workers.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Implementing that principle would require the insourcing of outsourced public services; the permanent employment of EPWP, CHW and other workers performing continuing functions; the filling of vacant public-service posts; and a massive programme of socially useful public works under democratic working-class control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no shortage of work to be done; there is a shortage of jobs because, under capitalism, the employment of labour is ultimately subordinated to budgets, profitability and the priorities of those who control society\u2019s wealth. The struggle against precarious employment therefore cannot finally be separated from the struggle over who controls the economy and for what purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From resistance to a socialist programme<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The EPWP workers began with their immediate experience \u2014 poverty wages, temporary contracts and the demand for permanent employment \u2014 but struggle revealed the wider forces standing behind those conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Behind the temporary contract stood the EPWP system; behind EPWP, the restructuring of public employment; behind that restructuring, GEAR and the capitalist settlement from which it developed; and behind these, a capitalist system that treats labour as a cost to be minimised even where enormous human needs remain unmet. This is how an immediate struggle can acquire a transitional character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Workers begin from what they need now: permanent jobs and a living wage<\/strong>. In fighting for those demands they collide with the priorities of the capitalist state and are compelled to ask increasingly fundamental questions about how society is organised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer cannot be the permanent management of unemployment through one temporary programme after another. South Africa possesses enormous productive resources and its working class possesses the skills and labour required to transform society; what stands between those resources and the needs of the majority is the private ownership and capitalist organisation of the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The struggle for permanent jobs must therefore form part of a wider programme for rebuilding the trade unions, organising the unemployed and precarious, building a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme, and bringing the commanding heights of the economy under democratic working-class ownership and control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The EPWP workers have demonstrated that precarious workers can organise and fight. Their unfinished demand poses the next question:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why should permanent work ever be performed through permanent insecurity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Next in the EPWP Victory Series<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the final article we turn these lessons towards action: building a united campaign that links workers\u2019 sectoral struggles with working-class communities around permanent jobs, a living wage and rebuilt public services. The fight for permanent work requires permanent organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n