#workplace struggles

A SEVEN DAY working week, sometimes as long as 16 hours a day. That’s the lot of many clothing workers in Bangladesh. Mistreatment and beatings are common. So is sexual harassment. Even rape and murder are not unknown.

Since last summer, the National Garment Workers Federation has organised many large demonstrations against these primitive conditions. Job security is non-existent and hundreds of union activists have been sacked.

WSM Members and Unions

All WSM members are expected to join a union if one organises in their workplace and to look for opportunities to agitate for such organisation when one does not yet exist.

All WSM members are required to respect picket lines and other forms of union action.

In organised workplaces WSM members are expected to attend union meetings and encouraged to take on unpaid, mandated and recallable roles, particularly at the base level of union representative and shop steward. They are encouraged to take available trainings.

WSM members can only run for paid office in a union as part of a broader rank & file campaign to take control of the union and that campaign includes a plan to make such a role accountable and recallable if it is not already so.

Workplace Struggle — Unions

Yet workers are not powerless. Without our work nothing is produced. Some of us have some power because our skills are rare but most of us are replaceable and therefore our only power is that obtained through collective struggle.

Over time the organisation of collective struggle resulted in the formation of organisations that continued to exist between such struggles in the hope of building power and solidarity over time. These organisations are unions and have and continue to exist in many forms.

A workplace with a union is one where it is generally possible to openly agitate with our fellow workers, including the ability to hold assemblies of all the unionised workers. This possibility is the greatest ongoing potential of union organisation and the reason why we remain members of unions that are otherwise problematic.

The unions we want are those where all the power is found at the base, i.e. all power lies at meetings of all unionised workers. All levels of the union above this should be mandated and recalled by the base. Any paid staff of such a union should be organisers, specialists or administrators answerable to the membership without any other decision making power.

Work and the Workplace

The workplace remains the location where many of us are likely to spend much of our adult lives. We are dependent on the wage we earn for food, housing and all our basic and complex needs.

The workplace is anywhere where we do work. For many people this means turning up to work shifts for a business, i.e the capitalist workplace

However, for many people the home is their workplace, and for others it is one of their main workplaces. This domestic work, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work such as tending to infirm relatives and child rearing, is mostly done by women and goes unpaid and unrecognised as ‘real work’ in capitalist patriarchal society. However, it is fundamental to sustaining ourselves and reproducing human society and it deserves to be paid. Workplace struggle should include the demand for a wage for domestic work at present and ultimately achieve a free and fair division of all socially necessary labour.

We recognise that the strike is not limited to the capitalist workplace but also involves the ‘social strike’ for example in the sphere of reproductive labour (such as domestic work) and continued functioning of the city.

Unions and shopfloor militancy

Economic liberalisation has resulted in retrenchments, deteriorating work conditions, massive inflation and a government reluctance to pay severance packages. These conditions have met with a militant, if uneven, response from workers.

A central site of conflict is the civil service. Workers in the Zambian United Local Authorities and Allied Workers Union (ZULAWLJ) embarked on a two month strike at Mufumbwe local council for higher wages in 1995. In Livingstone workers who had not been paid for two months also went on strike. In February 1996, the Civil Servants Union of Zambia (CSUZ) organised a week-long countrywide strike to demand payment of a 45% wage increase granted by the Industrial Court. They were joined by National Union of Public Service Workers (NUPSW) members. Further strikes took place in Livingstone in March, October and December of that year. After seven months of negotiation, the CSUZ was able to announce wage increases ranging between 36 and 70%, and a number of allowances.

Retrenched workers have also organised protests demanding their severance packages. In January 1996, retrenched workers protested at the Livingstone office of Zambia Railways. In July former workers from the Kafile council launched a legal action to prevent the sale of the council houses in which they live. In September, 140 retrenched workers from the liquidated United Miing Company protested at the Chingola Civic Centre against non-payment of their severance packages. President Chiluba, who was visiting the area at the time, reacted angrily to protestors, telling them not to intimidate the government.

A number of militant standoffs have occurred. In March 1996, three senior managers at Hybrid Poultry Farm in Lusaka were nearly lynched by 200 irate workers striking against their alleged mismanagement and bad attitude towards workers. The workers were members of the National Union of Plantation and Agricultural Workers ONPAW). In October, the Managing Director of the Medical Stores narrowly escaped a similar fate, following an angry meeting on the future of the enterprise. The MD took the opportunity to escape as NWSW officials addressed the workers. The workers then turned their anger on other managers, grabbing their car keys and jeering at them to walk home or catch a minibus. Workers passed a vote of no confidence in management.

Other actions took place throughout 1996. In April, 2000 railway workers were dismissed for striking for better wages, but were later reinstated. In May, workers at the newly privatised Dairy Produce Board protested the decision by the company’s new South African owners, Bonnita Zambia Limited, to retrench 200 of the company’s 240 workers without retrenchment packages. In September, Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT) members struck sporadically in Kitwe and Chingola against an inadequate wage increase. In September, junior nurses and other medical personnel at the University Teaching Hospital embarked on an illegal strike for higher wages and allowances. The strike was not supported by either the CSUZ or the Zambia National Union of Health and Allied Workers, who asserted that negotiations were already underway. The strikers were joined by other clinics. In October 1996, mineworkers striking over the non-payment of bonuses at the Nchanga division of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) were forced to work at gun point. They responded by sabotaging equipment underground. A number were dismissed as the strike continued, and the MUZ had to battle to get those arrested for damaging equipment released.