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19 August, 2009
The rapid increase in precarious work is being driven both by corporations and governments. Across the world, national labour laws are being amended to better enable employers to create yet more precarious jobs at the expense of stable employment. This stands in the way of development and keeps Africa chained in poverty. In this article we take a closer look at the issue of casualisation of jobs in Africa and what unions must do to deal with this problem. We discuss three levels that we can fight precarious work concluding that unions becoming more sustainable organisations and changing how they operate is the prerequisite for really impacting on the issue.
Most workers in Africa will have become used to the increasing number of casualised workers around the shop floor and often outside the factory gate. The formal sector in many countries has gotten smaller in terms of jobs while informal workers have gotten more plentiful and the informal sector as a whole has grown. Unions have stagnated or are much smaller often to the point where the number of workers in the narrow industrial sectors they organize in are not sufficient to sustain the union as an organisation. In such an environment developing and implementing a strategy for dealing with precarious work seems like an impossible task ultimately meaning that many unions will become irrelevant to most workers in Africa.
Companies are continually restructuring, downsizing, retrenching and generally putting more pressure on workers. Capital used to argue that they deserve the profit because they take the risks in establishing a business and yet using precarious work passes that risk on to workers who can least afford it. Any unionist will tell you that it is a very difficult fight to win because this precarious nature happens gradually in a workplace by workplace fashion isolating workers struggles on the issue. It is also done in a specific workplace over time. Employers frequently hold the upper hand in terms of labour law that has in more recent times become more flexible to attract business investment, making it easier for employers to lay off workers and use casuals. In fighting these issues in the workplace it is critical we remind ourselves of old lessons of solidarity and ensure that all workers understand that even if they are not immediately effected by a change in the long term every move to flexibility ultimately makes their job and working
conditions more insecure and erodes the power to bargain for a better quality of work life. This is not to say that workers do not fight back and sometimes win, but the labour market statistics tell us that these victories are the exception and not the norm.
Three Levels of Strategy
Workplace struggles
The workplace level of resistance will be very familiar to most unions who have engaged in battles over these issues. One of the principal points to remember in this arena is that restructuring to casualise jobs is never a one off process and what concessions you agree today weakens you tomorrow. Unions are pulled between two issues when engaging in restructuring. At one level the unions tries to protect the individual member through getting the best deal possible for those workers affected but also needs to balance the interests of the workers left behind whose position is almost always weaker after the loss of fellow workers to retrenchment.
Some unions have tried job security agreements which have served to stall the process and technology introduction agreements have also proved useful. Where the company is not in danger of closing down more powerful forms of industrial action have sometimes stopped employers as well as tactics such as embarrassing the employer internationally or to its government. Labour law has improved in some countries e.g. South Africa in dealing with retrenchments whilst it has got worse in others but in general labour law has always proved a weak instrument in stopping retrenchments and the casualisation of jobs.
In any event even if employers don't retrench at all they still introduce flexibility by allowing attrition to reduce the number of full time jobs and then using precarious work forms to do these jobs. This suggests that even the strongest of unions will battle to stem the tide of precarious work and that other forms of engagement will be necessary to deal with this issue. In fact the process of making labour more flexible and responsive to the needs of capital has been going on for so long now that already huge numbers of workers have lost full time jobs and swelled the ranks of the 'semi employed'.
Development Policy and Campaigning
This suggests that a single union resisting the transformation of jobs to precarious work will always be limited in what can be done about the overall problem. Solidarity for this reason alone needs to be taken more seriously and unions have to become less isolated in their approach to these issues. Failure to do this is a failure of the organisation and its leadership. Currently IMF is preparing an initiative on precarious work and it is critical that unions put their full support behind this effort. The ITUC along with the global union federations have also begun a global initiative on decent work for development. This was launched at the recent world social forum and covered in the last edition of UMOJA. Again unions must come together and build real solidarity. Behind these types of campaigns lies a call for governments to use job creation as a way of creating sustained development as opposed to the failed and discredited policies of structural adjustment and the like.
Global solidarity must pressure both local governments and global bodies to rethink their development paradigm and move jobs to the top of the agenda. Other initiatives such as the decent work programme of the ILO add momentum to these efforts. This has been supported by different recommendations and conventions of the ILO aimed at controlling labour broking and the shift to precarious work forms. Unions can begin the process of involvement by looking at the questions on precarious work in this edition of UMOJA and responding to the IMF call for submissions on the issue. This process should also help focus thinking on the issue and the preparation of national demands. Lobbying other unions and national centres to pursue the issue is a further necessary step.
Organising People in Precarious Work
A third level of engagement is for unions to return to what they should do best and that is organizing workers around points of collective interest. If workers in precarious jobs are organized there will be less motivation for employers to attempt to create these kinds of jobs.
When it comes to organizing casualised workers however we have often failed to achieve this objective. One of the reasons this has proved so difficult in the past is that the union can offer fairly little to such workers in the conventional bargaining sense and secondly that it is hard to collect dues and keep track of such mobile workers. This has often been because we have used standard organizing approaches and unions have failed to change their structures and methods to meet the needs of this growing number of workers. In the past more centralised or industry level bargaining mechanisms have been used to do this but establishing such mechanisms normally requires a fairly powerful position at the table to begin with and this is not the case for most unions in Africa.
What we need to consider is a broad approach to draw such workers into an organised framework that will improve their collective strength. Informal workers generally must stand alone and have very little power. They also suffer a great deal as they have no job security, no way to plan and no access to social security. Where HIV/AIDS programmes exist at a workplace those engaged in precarious work are often excluded. Many women are confined to precarious work forms. These are the types of common interests these workers have and should be our starting point in developing organising tactics for such workers.
A common problem which is very easy to remedy is that many unions across Africa exclude casuals as workers that can belong to the union. Unless this is changed as an organisation the union cannot even get to the starting point of addressing this issue. Secondly sub/dues collection systems and membership records systems are based on a very static model of employment. The union is often reliant on the factory to subtract dues and where services have been subcontracted cannot access such a system. When a worker leaves employment they cease to be union members. Again this is common constitutional constraint can be easily remedied. A worker could remain a member between jobs but not pay subs in this time. The use of IT for such systems perhaps linked to debit systems if members have bank accounts may be a way to deal with these logistical issues.
Union officials have sometimes become office bound or are drawn into fighting legal cases as opposed to spending time with workers at the factory. In such a case waiting for casual workers to come to the union is a hopeless tactic. Organising casual workers, means being mobile and spending the vast majority of organizing time in the field. This should not be confined to main factories but take place in recruitment offices, on the streets of industrial areas where workers wait for a factory call, communities and engaging labour brokers if necessary with groups of organizers from more than one union. Union negotiations need to pay attention to casual workers and in particular their needs. Building social security systems that focus on these kinds of workers are another key area that can be used to appeal to these workers. Perhaps engaging the ILO's social protection agenda can be useful here. Unions also need to take the issue of skills development more seriously and where the union itself can become involved in the delivery of skills to workers their will better opportunities for organizing these workers.
Gender and HIV/AIDS as workplace issues have enormous importance to casualised workers and therefore may provide very powerful rallying points for workers to recognise their common interests and the potential of collective action. But this would require genuine engagement on such issues on the part of the union.
Unions concentrating in narrow industrial sectors is probably the fundamental hurdle to organizing atypical workers who may work in a number of different industrial sub sectors in a year. Forming broader manufacturing based unions through merger has become a strategic priority and yet unions remain isolated often to protect positions for a handful of leaders. Despite these problems the positive message is that deciding how to organise ourselves is one of the few things we as labour have complete control over.
What is important to realise is that not only one tactic that will change our failures to organize these workers who if they are not already will soon be the majority of the workforce. It will require a long term strategy that first sees unions overcoming self protection and sectionalized interests, reforming of union systems and benefits, changes in how organising happens and the kinds of needs that unions service, different organizing techniques that penetrate beyond the traditional workplace and the building of alliances amongst unions, communities and agencies such as the ILO.
This all suggests that a three prong strategy has become necessary. At one level we need to continue to resist at the workplace and develop our tactics in doing this. At a second level we need to be more coordinated so as to begin to address the issue at a national, regional and global level through our engagement in policy issues. This must be directed by the understanding that precarious work undermines development. The final prong which has proved particularly difficult is to organise flexible or casualised workers. The biggest single step forward in all these areas will however occur where unions at a national level cooperate and form together into sustainable general or manufacturing unions. Until this happens many unions in Africa will be kept in survivalist activities running from project to project in an attempt to raise more donor funds making themselves more accountable to funders than workers. In such a scenario precarious work will triumph and history will hold our current leadership accountable. The question that must be asked is why are we not changing what we can as soon as possible.