Morecroft, Samuel James (2021) “THIS THING IS HISTORICAL!”: UNDERSTANDING NUMSA’S SPLIT WITH COSATU THROUGH THE LENS OF PERMANENT CONTENTION. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.
Abstract
This thesis examines the processes that have led to the fracturing of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South Africa’s largest trade union federation, in the wake of the federations largest affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, (NUMSA), resolving to break with the Tripartite Alliance at its December 2013 Congress. The Alliance between COSATU, the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party has been in power in South Africa since the end of Apartheid in 1994, and the split that has taken place within COSATU is closely related to the political dynamics of this partnership. Furthermore, the thesis considers the implications for the labour movement, and for labour relations in general, in South Africa. The thesis represents an examination of competing traditions and political agencies of labour unionism in South Africa that predate the formation of both COSATU and the Tripartite Alliance. This is done to provide a fresh perspective on debates around the relationship between COSATU in the ANC, which have generally focused on the durability and desirability of this Alliance between organised labour and the ruling party, rather than on the heterogenous political and organisational tendencies that exist within the COSATU itself. In doing so, while acknowledging the role that the ANC’s record in government and the response of the state towards labour mobilisations has played in the split that has taken place, the thesis argues that the political dynamics of competing traditions and agencies within COSATU itself must be understood in order to develop a complete analysis of what has taken place. The thesis is informed by qualitative fieldwork conducted in the form of semi-structured interviews and participant observations, carried out within NUMSA grassroots structures and among grassroots NUMSA representatives. The contribution to knowledge made by this thesis is two-fold. Firstly, the thesis draws upon fieldwork to provide an account of the Tripartite Alliance as it has been understood by NUMSA activists, and an understanding of what led the union to resolve to break with the Alliance and begin the process of exploring new working-class political formations such as the United Front and the establishment of a worker’s socialist party. Secondly, while the thesis situates its understanding of the South African labour movement in both the pre- and post-Apartheid contexts in the theoretical framework provided by John Kelly’s (1998) Mobilisation Theory, the thesis proposes an adaptation to this theory in the form of the concept of Permanent Contention, in order to allow for the development of an account that considers both the dynamic interaction of contention between labour movements and the state, but also the dynamic interaction of competing political and organisational tendencies, traditions and models of unionism within labour movements themselves. Through this process, the conflict that exists within the South African labour movement is conceptualised as primarily representing a conflict between populist and shopfloor traditions of labour unionism, and it is argued that the split that has taken place within COSATU, and even the new labour federation that has been formed in the wake of this split, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) represents the re-emergence of a historically contingent tradition of labour unionism; the tradition of the shopfloor.
Metadata
Supervisors: | Pattie, Charles and Harrison, Graham and Joseph, Jonathan |
---|---|
Keywords: | Numsa, Cosatu, Tripartite Alliance, Mobilisation theory, post apartheid, South African trade unions, permanent contention |
Awarding institution: | University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Politics (Sheffield) |
Identification Number/EthosID: | uk.bl.ethos.883423 |
Depositing User: | Mr Samuel James Morecroft |
Date Deposited: | 13 Jun 2023 09:53 |
Last Modified: | 01 Jul 2023 09:53 |
Download
Final eThesis - complete (pdf)
Filename: THIS THING IS HISTORICAL thesis corrections final (2).pdf
Licence:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Export
Statistics
You do not need to contact us to get a copy of this thesis. Please use the 'Download' link(s) above to get a copy.
You can contact us about this thesis. If you need to make a general enquiry, please see the Contact us page.