THE COMPLEXITIES OF WORKER CONTROL

The ‘worker control’ principle is at the heart of NUM's and Cosatu's ideologies. It is based on the double assumption that workers ought to (i) democratically control their own organisations (hence preventing officials from dominating union and federation structures); and (ii) effectively expand such control, as members of the working class, to overall society (as expressed in NUM's famous motto: ‘1987 – the year mineworkers take control’).

This idea and its practice has also been historically at the heart of trade unionism worldwide. It found a radical meaning in anarcho-syndicalism, which promoted decentralised, autonomous and factory-based forms of workers’ organisation, and a classist meaning in Marxism-Leninism according to which unions represented the workers but were to be subject to the Party's authority. Far from the anarchist or workerist ideals of a locally grounded power, independent of top structures in the organisation, worker control in NUM is firmly rooted in the socialist tradition of centralised, hierarchical and disciplined organisation. As a 1999 report acknowledged: ‘Over the years the union has tended to become centralist with a very powerful head office and national structures.’ The report vowed to fight against this tendency and to ‘devolve this power and responsibility to branches’. The tension between the reality of a centralised organisation and its will to decentralise is well summarised in the following quote by former NUM general secretary Frans Baleni, who once wrote that branches

Such a description makes branches the seat of union power in a bottom-up type of relationship with upper structures. Figure 4.1 illustrates this insistence on the base as the root of union power. Baleni's words, however, also describe a top-down ‘pyramidal’ structure in which decision-making effectively lies with the top structure.