Who will play Margaret Thatcher to Irvin Jim’s Arthur Scargill?

A trade union is a fine thing. It enables working men and women to stand together, negotiate with employers together, and secure a greater share of prosperity together. A strong trade union is absolutely the right antidote when ‘bosses’ are too powerful, too oppressive and too determined to wring the last ounce of profit from people who are indistinguishable from slaves. Read a history of the trade union movement in Britain in the 19th and early 20th Century if you disbelieve me – or just look at our own history and the political role played by the NUM and the UDF in the 1980s as the anvil on which apartheid was broken by world opinion and sanctions.

But there comes a point when the balance tilts too far in the opposite direction. When the unions themselves become the enemy of broader society.

It happened in Britain in the late 60s and 70s. Like hyenas, the unions had that nation by the windpipe and were biting down hard. Industry after industry was destroyed, electricity brownouts were common, as were three-day working weeks and mountains of garbage in public places. Government appeared powerless to throw the attackers off until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. It is Thatcher who is credited with breaking the power of the unions.

The image is too stark. Thatcher certainly battled the British trade unions, but she did so for many years. Her war – there’s no other word for it – with the miners and their leader Arthur Scargill lasted half a decade or more. Thatcher broke the unions? No – more a case of a grinding roll-back, a victory through attrition.

But by 1990, when she was defenestrated, Thatcher had restored the balance of power between government and unions.

Remember that apart from employing shop stewards and higher officials like General Secretaries, no trade union has ever started a business, turned a profit or created a job. This is not chicken-and-egg: without a business there cannot be a trade union. For that matter, without a business there cannot be either the corporate or personal taxes to sustain a government.

So a balance of power is right and appropriate: businesses need to be able to thrive while working men and women need to be able to benefit from their labour in such businesses.

For some years now, South Africa has lurched towards – and may even have passed – trade union ruled Britain of the 1970s.

The evidence-in-chief is this:

– NUMSA, very much in the spotlight as a result of its recent expulsion from COSATU, is single-handedly responsible for the stoppages at Medupi and Kusile. These have left Eskom and the rest of industry on their knees begging for electricity.
– NUMSA again, whose actions have hit both the car manufacturing and component supply industries, as well as the steel and engineering sectors, to the extent that one major manufacturer has warned that it will cease production here and another has confirmed that a new manufacturing contract was actually lost as a result of labour unrest
– SADTU, which has done more to entrench Bantu Education than the National Party. Not my opinion alone but stated very clearly by City Press Editor Ferial Haffajee this last weekend.
– The Communication Workers’ Union which has crippled the Post Office for over three months, causing untold damage to hundreds of small businesses which depend on mailings for their livelihoods.
– A whole host of trade unions for whom extreme violence and intimidation is now the first order of the day.
– And a string of above-inflation wage settlements which the country simply cannot afford.

South Africa desperately needs a Thatcher figure to swing the balance back to the middle. Jim and his NUMSA thugs are at least as powerful as Britain’s miners in their heyday – and they are doing as much damage to our economy.

But like Britain’s Labour governments of that period – first Harold Wilson and then ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan – the ANC government here is bent on appeasement, issuing several statements through its various organs about “tragic” NUMSA’s exit from COSATU is. Like Britain’s Labour Party, the ANC receives significant funding from COSATU. This, of course, may change with a smaller, poorer federation post-NUMSA.

South Africa’s government is failing in its manifest duty to protect the interests of all citizens – businesses and the unemployed – to benefit an increasingly out-of-control but extremely powerful minority – the trade unions.

What Margaret Thatcher realised was that without forceful and determined intervention, the unions would have become so powerful, so over-mighty and so destructive that Britain itself would have collapsed.

Do any of our leaders here understand that we’re facing the same problem?

Furthermore, headlines over the past 48 hours suggest that by weakening COSATU, NUMSA’s exit, accompanies by seven other unions, has weakened the Tripartite Alliance. But that would imply that the Alliance was strong in the first place. It is not. In fact the reverse holds true – the Alliance is at its weakest point since democracy came to this country 20 years ago.

It has no Thatcher figure to drive it forward and to restore it to greatness. Irvin Jim knows that, which is why he has made his move.