Autonomous Worker Committees in Marikana, South Africa:
Journey to the Mountain
Luke Sinwell
On 27 August 2012, directly below the mountain in Marikana where 34 workers were brutally murdered by the police less than 2 weeks earlier, a Lonmin worker named Babalo, who was responsible for welcoming visitors after the massacre, introduced us to an extremely influential and arguably new form of independent working class leadership.[1] We sat with 8 workers in the sun on the dry yellow hay like grass and asked them, ‘what do you call yourselves?’ One of the leaders, Thabiso, began to chair the meeting. He smirked at us and then responded that their organisation had no name, but that they were the ‘workers’ committee’, as if to suggest that this was self-explanatory. Neither the management of Lonmin, nor the established unions including the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) nor the competing Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) were in control.[2] Rather, it was the workers themselves – their vehicle was the workers’ committee. This was our first interaction with the committee at Marikana and we have maintained contact with them since.
This has been essential for obtaining the sensitive information which surrounds the massacre given the levels of distrust that have subsequently developed amongst the workers. As one former worker committee member who was responsible for negotiating with the management after the 16th August indicated to us in the process of arranging an interview with him, ‘during these times, one cannot even trust his own brother.’[3] Some of the workers would later turn to alcoholism to cope while others would take their own lives and the lives of others. The events of the 16th have scarred the consciousness of the workers in Lonmin. One worker, who helped initiate the August 2012 strike, lamented that:
It was very difficult for us and even now our lives after the 16th has changed and I don’t remember the last time we felt happy about anything or smiling about something since the 16th[August 2012]… Even at night, when you sleep, once you think about what happened then you lose your sleep for 2 or 3 hours because you took everything upon yourself. And then you will keep thinking, why did things get like that?[4]
To a certain extent we – as researchers - have also lived Marikana and we have dreamt of it at night, but our experiences are nothing like those of the heroic figures who risked their lives on the infamous mountain. To them, the strike literally became a matter of life and death. Many of the workers we have engaged with continue to vow that they would die, if not for their demand for a living wage – 12,500 – then for the rights of workers more generally. We have experienced Marikana a great step removed from these realities.[5]
Seeking to uncover the intimate dynamics within a post-massacre context is obviously no easy task and requires a significant degree of commitment on behalf of the researchers. Workers understandably tended to be sceptical – and at times even hostile - to those who came to Marikana including journalists and academics. In order to understand Marikana, and its workers’ committee, it was therefore necessary to conduct ethnographic research. It seeks to understand, from the people’s own perspective, what they do and the meanings that they associate with their actions. It also involved participant observation, the central method of ethnographic research. Participant observation is when the researcher attempts to understand a culture by observing what people are actually doing, and to a certain extent, as the word participant suggests, immersing and involving him or herself into the culture he or she is studying.
On 16 August 2012, 34 mineworkers were killed by the police with live ammunition in an event that has become known as the Marikana Massacre. At first - television footage, which showed mineworkers charging the police with deadly weapons, suggested to the public that the police were responding in self-defence. However, later evidence, drawn in part from research done by the University of Johannesburg told a very different story of a planned killing.[6] Indeed, the police had ordered 4 mortuary vans (they hold about 8 people each) which were to arrive in Marikana on the day of the massacre and 3000 rounds of live ammunition were ushered into Marikana on that morning. Further evidence (see Desai 2014) from police filming also shows that the police had their hands ready to shoot and that their guns were cocked prior to the mineworkers beginning to charge towards them. In fact, they were running past the police to go home - to the adjacent informal settlement called Nkaneng in order to avoid being killed.
This chapter does not seek to advance an argument about thesociology of the massacre itself. For that, readers should get a copy of Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer which provides an examination of the events surrounding the massacre from perspective of the mineworkers who survived it.[7] They should also watchMiners Shot Downwhich offers a devastating analysis of the role of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the police, Lonmin (the platinum company) and the ruling African National Congress (ANC).[8]
Rather, the paper makes use of empirical evidence in order to explain how and why the workers of Lonmin – the 3rd largest platinum company in the world – bypassed and then eventually left the union – NUM – which they had been members of. It also details the changing nature of the autonomous workers’ committee that was formed in order to negotiate directly with management. The paper demonstrates that this was a temporary committee which in part explains why workers soon jettisoned the committee and then joined the rival union – AMCU.
Following the massacre, NUM which was once the ‘darling’ of workers was now conceived of as an enemy which was on the side of the bosses. In this line of thinking, one leader of the worker’s committees – in a play on words - called it, the ‘National Union of Management.’ It should also be noted that discontent with the NUM was not new and did not begin in 2012 which was a tipping point. Surveys undertaken by the Society Work and Development Institute (SWOP) on shop stewards of NUM revealed that in the Rustenburg region, satisfaction with union representation was the worst.[9]
Drawing from in-depth interviews and informal meetings with dozens of workers who had been members of the committee or went to the mountain on 16 August, the paper seeks to uncover exactly what this elusive committee is and how it has changed over time. In so doing it profiles the history of workers who organised in order to stage one of the most important unprotected strikes in South African history – a strike which exerted such great power over a period of merely 7 days until, on 16 August, virtually the entire national security of the ANC was deployed. Orders were given by the police to use full force and to kill miners if necessary. The outcome is now well-known – 34 miners died in what has been called the Marikana Massacre and no police were killed or injured on the day.
Since the burgeoning of trade unions from the mid to late 1900s until the present, trade unions have been the preferred topic of investigation by labour historians.[10] Industrial sociology in post-apartheid South Africa has followed this trend as it has been dominated by investigations into formalised unions which operate within the framework of the tri-partite alliance.[11]Buhlungu in particular has noted the anti-democratic nature of unions, the tendency for shop stewards to drift away from workers and become part of the bureaucracy, rather than to represent them, as well as the discontent that has resulted from this.[12] He has also called the victory of 1994 – whereby the trade union federation COSATU gained great influence as a partner with the ANC - ‘A Paradox of Victory’.[13] COSATU and its affiliated unions were closest to power, but they arguably became victims of that same power. To a certain extent they became institutionalised and a fundamental component of the neoliberal programme adopted by the ANC in 1996 called the Growth Employment and Redistribution Policy (GEAR) which replaced the more people-centred Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). COSATU played a key role in formulating the RDP only to see it jettisoned in the name of market principles and international investors.
The tendency of social scientists to focus on formalised structures in the workplace and elsewhere has eclipsed the possibility of studying informal organisations – in this case worker committees. The agency of workers, and more specifically the independent worker’s committee, is arguably the key feature surrounding the event of the Marikana Massacre – one which is likely to become as important symbolically as the Soweto Uprisings or the Sharpeville Massacre – turning points in South African history. According to Frankel, author of the authoritative text on the Sharpeville Massacre, ‘Marikana has [already] become a moral barometer against which future developments in mining and wider South Africa will be measured for many years to come.’[14]The committee at Marikana is important in understanding the strike wave along the Rustenburg Platinum belt where these independent organisations emerged - though the committee at Lonmin was not necessarily the first or the most long-lasting of these committees.[15] Only empirical research, grounded in oral histories of those survivors who were centrally involved, can uncover the hidden details which shed light on the nature of these committees and their political trajectory. At this stage, scholars and the general public know very little about them or their relationship to unions. The Commission of Inquiry, iniated by President Zuma and Launched on 1 October 2012, was intended to unpack the causes of the events between the 9th and 16th August in Marikana, but is also unlikely to provide much information about these committees.[16]
This paper argues that the worker’s committee in Lonmin offered both ‘a direct challenge to capitalist hegemony” and a reformist attempt which operated inside “the capitalist logic of profitability’.[17] It investigates what happens in between the two extremes. While the demands made by the workers – and the committee – were reformist (demanding higher wages) the methods employed by the workers did – in the end - challenge the hegemony of capital and reshape the structural conditions in which people act presently. From the 11th of August – 5 days prior to the massacre, the workers removed the wage negotiating table from the offices of management, and placed it at the foot of the mountain of the working class. Their power could only be contained by a combined effort of the police, the ANC, and Lonmin to use their full force to literally kill the mineworkers.
The management eventually responded that the R12,500 could not be given to Karee only, but was a decision to be made for all the mines at Lonmin. This provided the worker leaders with the impetus to unite all the shafts at Lonmin - leading to a mass meeting of Rock Driller Operators (RDOs) on 9 August 2012.[18] When the workers were attacked during a march to the NUM on 11 August, they formed a new ad hoc committee on the infamous mountain with the primary purpose of protecting themselves from the NUM, preventing people from going to work, ensuring that there was a non-violent approach amongst the workers, and engaging with visitors including unions and the police. They waited patiently for their employer at the mountain until the police – who seem to have given the go-ahead by key ANC officials (see Desai 2014) – underwent operation “D-day” and massacred 34 workers with live ammunition.
‘People don’t just elect a leader’ - one of the younger workers’ committee members’ states – ‘they study the person first.’ Members of the committee were chosen by their fellow workers because of their sober minds, their respectfulness towards others, because they say things as they are, and do not renege on decisions made by the collective. They listen carefully, have the ability to maintain order and simultaneously can lead people in the right direction. Nevertheless, the power of the workers’ committee was based on the workers themselves and underpinned by notions of radical direct democracy. As one member indicated, ‘we were chosen by the workers and we cannot make any decisions without them saying so first… We had to do what they wanted.’Reflecting on the logic of the strike, another member explained the logic behind the formation of an independent committee, ‘we wanted it to be known that without us [workers] the union will not exist.’ The allegation that the 2012 strike at Lonmin was the result of inter-union rivalry functions to serve the interests of NUM and mine management – it does not take seriously the core demands of workers. Rather, it assumes that workers are objects, rather than subjects of the unions of which they belong, incapable of thinking and acting on their own.
The paper explains the different stages in which the committee expressed its power and how the politics which underpinned the committee – and the workers struggle at Lonmin more generally – changed over time. The demand for 12,500 remained constant despite shifts in the constitution and approach of the committee (discussed below) – including its decision to join the union, AMCU. Furthermore, their main demands and the idea of independent working class power have become embedded in the minds of ordinary South Africans.
The Origins of the Strike at Lonmin
Workers did not initially plan to strike at Lonmin – but rather to engage with management around a monthly increase and also for a wage demand of 12,500. However, when management refused to offer any serious concessions, the workers from one particular shaft at Lonmin called Karee began mobilise workers from the two other shafts – Eastern and Western. Days later, they held a mass meeting of around 3000 workers (all RDOs) and decided to begin the strike later in the day.
An informal workers’ committeeconsisting of (RDOs) emerged at Lonmin in Karee mine in May/June 2012. At first they engaged with a small number of workers, but eventually about 100 RDOs began to attend.One of the foremost leaders of the committee reflects that, ‘They started opening their eyes. Now they are seeing that they were oppressed.’[19] The RDOs at Lonmin, in Karee mine in particular, had been undertaking strenuous labour – some for merely months and others for decades. Their earlier experiences highlighted to them that their unions were inadequate and they began to realise that they needed to do something on their own in order to transform their situation.
In particular they were disgruntled with the fact that in the two other main shafts at Lonmin – Eastern and Western – RDOs were given assistants to help with their drilling. They approached management with two demands: that they be given compensation for the fact that they didn’t have assistances and that their wages be increased to 12,500. To a significant extent management’s response to the informal RDO representatives was responsible for extending the demand of R12,500 beyond the one shaft – Karee - where it was popularised independently. Management thus provided workers with the impetus to mobilise workers from other shafts. According to Molefi, ‘we told all the shafts… that we need to unite. So that we can fight for this 12,500 [together] because of the hard work that we are doing.’[20]
At this time, RDOs in Eastern and Western were not stagnant: they desired an increase in wages and were slowly becoming more and more disillusioned with the NUM. Sandile who worked at Eastern shaft was one of these workers. Born in 1981, he grew up in a town called Qumbu in the Eastern Cape and left school after finishing standard 9 in 1999 because he lacked money for food and transport. Like others in his community, he lived far away from the school that he attended and he walked 45 kilometres – leaving at a staggering 3am each morning in order to arrive at 7:50am. Dissatisfied with the low wages he was receiving from other jobs thereafter, he came to Lonmin in April 2011 and became an RDO. He joined the NUM at Eastern because it was 'the only union that was working in the mine [at the time].’[21] Mass meetings were held regularly with RDOs and the NUM shop stewards and he was one of the ordinary members who stood up at meetings in May and June 2012 in order to demand better wages and working conditions from the NUM leaders. The workers, including Sandile, hoped the NUM would provide positive feedback regarding their demands, but they never did so. He recollected:
I am waiting a long, long time. Thereafter waiting I take [the] decision on 9 August [2012] to organise the RDOs to come in the stadium to talk about what to do… [Because] this money is so small. It’s not enough.[22]