Introduction
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) emerged from under the wing of the ruling party in the second half of the 1980s to become the epicentre of organised oppositional politics in Zimbabwe. This was the time in which the ZCTU was in its most radical mode, professing Marxism-Leninism, and bucking both the state and imperialism. But its radicalism stood on weak organisational legs: it lacked solid links to the shop floor; it had no organic links to small farmers and informal workers; formal workers themselves lacked familiarity with trade union affairs in their occupational sectors; and both trade unions and membership were poor. The transformation of the labour centre into a worker-controlled and viable force would be pursued over the following years under difficult conditions: at the national level, the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) was being set into motion, and state coercion was being deployed against the disenfranchised; at the global level, the Soviet Union was collapsing and international trade unionism was being reduced to the virtually uncontested ‘market friendly’ social democracy professed by the International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICFTU).
In this two-part study, it will be argued that the ZCTU emerged as a political force to be reckoned with, but that in the process it underwent a significant identity change. This trajectory of rise and fall can be traced through three phases: that of radical political unionism (1990–1995);1 social democratic strategic unionism (1995–1997); and social democratic political unionism (1998–2000). The identity change touched every aspect of the centre's teachings, from its understanding of national sovereignty, to worker participation, to who are the ‘natural’ allies of the working class, which in the early phase consisted in the peasantry. The first part of this study will focus on the first half of the decade, corresponding to the ‘rise’ of trade union radicalism against a neoliberal state, while the second will be devoted to the second half of the decade, corresponding to its ‘fall’.
Despite the political importance that the labour movement attained in post-colonial Zimbabwe, there is less work published on it than it deserves.2 This is especially true for the labour centre itself in its most crucial decade, the 1990s, for which there is virtually no systematic empirical work published. This lacuna is a real handicap in our understanding of Zimbabwe's subsequent polarisation.3
Confronting neoliberalism
In a 1988 statement, the new leadership of the ZCTU highlighted the multiple problems confronting the movement and proposed that the centre adopt a five-year development plan (SG 1988). The Secretary General, Morgan Tsvangirai, identified a long list of urgent tasks: the improvement of the administrative capacity and efficiency of the national centre; the mobilisation of workers and the democratisation of the movement; the amalgamation of unions; the establishment of full-time information/publicity and international departments; the achievement of financial self-sufficiency; the establishment of a labour college; the regaining of control of the annual May Day celebrations; and the revival of the labour movement's newspaper, The Worker, which had been out of circulation since 1987. In all, the project of the ZCTU was one of prying itself away from the grip of the state and gaining an independent capacity and voice in the affairs of the nation.
The 1990 Congress of the ZCTU launched the movement into the ‘global’ world (ZCTU 1990, 2):
In the past ten years the ideals of the liberation struggle to bring economic and political power to the people have been increasingly shelved. Real democracy and strong worker/peasant representation in political leadership has been traded in for peace with the capitalists and a leadership that has joined the wealthy in spirit and in flesh.
The Government strategy of staking the people's hopes on World Bank structural adjustment policies, on foreign investment, on privatisation and on trade liberalisation ignores the evidence of the devastating effects of these policies on working people across the globe and dooms a vast section of the society to permanent joblessness, hopelessness and economic insecurity. It further mortgages the economy to foreigners and leaves the nation economically powerless and without control over its future.
ESAP was formally launched in 1991 and it began to pinch soon after, with retrenchments in the clothing, textile, leather, and agricultural sectors, and the introduction of cost recovery measures in schooling and health provision. By 1992, inflation was galloping at 50%, wiping out pay increments of 24% that had been won during the collective bargaining season. 1992 was also the year in which the Labour Relations Act was amended. The ZCTU responded by protesting both the content of the amended LRA and the procedures by which it was enacted, pointing out that the labour movement had been effectively sidelined from the review of the LRA of 1985. While in 1987, in the spirit of tripartism, a tripartite committee had been composed to review the LRA, the set of changes agreed in that committee did not enter into the Bill that was eventually presented to Parliament. As in the case of the Investment Code and ESAP itself, the labour movement was denied a voice. Lack of consultation ‘creates a climate of adversarial industrial relations’, noted the ZCTU, ‘that will undermine our ability to meet the economic challenges we face in the 1990s… We are led to perceive the Labour Relations Amendment (LRA) Act as a symptom of a deeper issue related to ESAP’ (TW 1: March 1993). The ZCTU further protested by withdrawing its delegation from the 1992 ILO conference in Geneva and by holding peaceful marches in seven centres in the country. The government, in its turn, did not show signs of relenting. In 1992, President Mugabe for the first time refused to attend the May Day celebrations, in a symbolic message to the working class. And in June of the same year, government invoked the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act to ban a march in Harare against ESAP and the LRA Bill and to arrest six members of the ZCTU.
The widespread mobilisation against ESAP that was being spearheaded by the ZCTU raised suspicions among the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) that the labour centre was following the footsteps of its Zambian counterpart to form a political party – in Zambia this had led to the removal of UNIP from power after almost three decades at the helm. In 1992, however, the ZCTU affirmed its commitment made at its 1990 Congress to remain unaffiliated to any political party and to focus instead on building a strong labour movement with solid roots in the shop floor. But the ZCTU did not also shy away from seeking political involvement in national dialogue and from taking the government to task on the broad political issues that affected workers. Tsvangirai pointed out that:
… once the union starts calling for better living conditions for workers in terms of wages, health, safety or even pay increases, labour laws and economic policies, it has already entered into politics. There is no running away from that. The labour movement cannot therefore afford to shy away from politics since by its very nature it has to fight both government policies and employers' actions… What the unions are fighting for is political involvement. (TW 1: March 1993)
… our mandate is to make sure that workers are fairly treated, in and beyond the workplace. In this age of ESAP we have learned as unions, that we cannot be silent in any area affecting workers because our silence is our loss. (TW 4: June 1993)
These positions hardly assuaged the fears of government. In late 1992, John Nkomo, the Minister of Labour, refused to attend the ZCTU's bi-annual meeting in Chinhoyi. And in 1993, President Mugabe for the second consecutive year refused to attend the May Day celebrations, declaring that ‘the moment you turn yourself into a political party I will tell you I am ZANU–PF. I cannot go to May Day celebrations to be a subject of ridicule by school children like students at the University of Zimbabwe’ (TW 4: June 1993).
Snubbing May Day and identifying workers as non-adults were part of the struggle over the meaning of national liberation at the time of its ‘liberalisation’. The ZCTU did not shun national debate. The theme and slogan of its May Day celebration in 1991 was focused precisely on the same meanings: ‘Liberalisation or Liberation?’. In 1993, Tsvangirai re-affirmed the importance of this political struggle. ‘The slogan’, Tsvangirai (1993) argued, ‘summarised exactly what we understand about the Structural Adjustment Programme – an offensive recolonisation of Zimbabwe, rolling back the spirit and achievement of our liberation’. And, in revaluing the experiences of the besieged working class that government sought to belittle, he continued:
… today we know clearly what that recolonisation means. The child who has dropped out of the school that was built after independence knows it. The mother who cannot afford to deliver her second baby at the clinic where she delivered the first one knows it. The worker who has lost his job knows it. The unionist who met the batons of the riot police for staging a peaceful march knows it.
The nationalism of the labour centre in these early years was also anti-imperialist – even if more populist in tone than Marxist-Leninist – expressly rejecting the authority of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the ‘developmental’ pretensions of structural adjustment. At an international symposium of trade unionists in Harare in April 1993, Sibanda accused the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of imposing liberalisation on African economies while Northern countries continued to protect their own. ‘In international trade’, he added, ‘there is no love, there are no permanent friends, but there are permanent interests’ (TW 3: May 1993). In the same vein, the labour centre accused the government of serving foreign interests. ‘Suddenly, in the middle of this’, wrote Tsvangirai (1993) in reference to the tripartite consultations of the late 1980s:
… we heard from London that Zimbabwe was introducing a new Investment Code. Later, we realised that this was the first step towards our so-called homegrown Economic Structural Adjustment Programme. This was in fact a classical Washington hatched World Bank/IMF package (even with American spelling in the government document).
… political independence is a shallow victory when one's own economy cannot serve the fundamental interests of the population. World Bank SAP's do not build economies that serve the interests of African people. They build economies that pay and service debt.
The priorities which the labour centre emphasised were structural in nature, with land reform occupying centre stage, along with promotion of non-farm and informal activities. As articulated in the critique of the 1989 Investment Code (ZCTU 1989) and in the Workers' Participation and Development manual (ZCTU 1993), Sibanda reiterated that land reform remained a priority, for only this could ensure food security in the future and higher rural incomes:
… unless subsistence agriculture is transformed into a thriving industry that offers rural people a promise of rising incomes and new opportunities, the rural–urban exodus will continue thus compounding the open unemployment problem in the urban areas.
The government continued to fend off accusations that ESAP was ‘imposed from the outside’, and sought to affirm its liberation credentials with reference to the land question. ‘For the benefit of those ambassadors or high commissioners’, President Mugabe told his audience on Heroes Day 1993, ‘who have taken up the cause of the white farmer as their cause merely because those farmers are white and the rest of the people who are suffering are black, when we fought the struggle for liberation, we fought for the sovereign right to rule ourselves. And that right gives us ways and means of determining how the imbalances of the past can be corrected’ (TW 7: September 1993). Both, in fact, the government and the labour movement employed ‘anti-imperialist’ language. The difference between the two was that the government's nationalism steered clear of class analysis to defend an elitist nationalism, while the labour centre accused the government of making peace with capital, but especially its promotion of black capitalism. ‘Black advancement started as a noble thing’, Tsvangirai recalled in mid-decade on occasion of a flurry of industrial action in parastatals; he went on to indicate that black managers had themselves become as oppressive as ‘colonial masters’ (TW 12: April 1994). In the same spirit, labour leaders in the clothing, construction, banking, and commercial farming industries jointly condemned the indigenous employers who were undermining supervision by NECs by evading registration of their businesses with the relevant authorities. The labour leaders further pointed out that indigenous employers were engaged in unfair labour practices, such as the victimisation of unionised workers, non-payment of deducted union fees, non-payment of deducted pensions, and payment of low wages (TW 38: August 1996).
The early-decade victories of the labour movement must be seen in the context of the liberal assault on existing rights and living standards. The labour movement was firmly on the defensive and struggling to gain a position from which to bargain. In 1993, the average wage increase of 12.5% fell far below the cost of living index, while in 1994 the labour demand for a 25% increment during collective bargaining was itself appearing doomed. Meanwhile, despite the institutionalisation of collective bargaining, Labour Minister John Nkomo continued to intervene in wage-setting by issuing warnings that wage increments must not derail the economic reform programme and giving employers the green light to fire striking workers. Nonetheless, in early 1994, Post and Telecommunication (PTC) workers went on strike demanding payment of a 12.5% increment that, after dispute, had been awarded to them by the Labour Relations Tribunal, but that the employer was still refusing to pay. The industrial action started as a go-slow but turned into a fully-fledged strike by mid February, finally compelling the PTC to abide by the ruling. On a different front, the ZCTU was challenging the constitutionality of the government's use of the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act against the striking workers in 1992. In March 1994, after the PTC success, another victory was scored in this parallel front. The Supreme Court ruled against the government and for amendment of the Act, in a landmark ruling that opened the way for less inhibited political activity. In the process, the labour movement confirmed its leading role in the democratisation movement.
Suggesting a possible reopening of dialogue in light of impending elections in 1995, Labour Minister Florence Chitauro attended May Day celebrations in 1994, but without taking the platform, and also without stemming the momentum of the labour movement. In August 1994, the bank workers' union (ZIBAWU), inspired by the PTC workers' success and the Supreme Court ruling, went on a week-long strike of its own, gaining credibility among the workforce in the process and adding 600 new members to its roster. This action was followed by construction workers and security guards. The tide finally compelled President Mugabe to address labour issues publicly for the first time since the freezing of relations. Thus, on Heroes Day 1994, President Mugabe issued a call on employers to meet the pay demands of workers.
Despite such victories, workers in both public and private sectors were awarded increments below the 25% that had been demanded by the ZCTU in May 1994. Moreover, formal sector job cuts continued to take a toll on working people. Between January 1991 and March 1994, job losses amounted to 20,710 (TW 17: September 1994). Significantly, the textile industry was one of the biggest casualties of the early 1990s, on account of both ESAP and the expiry of the 1964 trade agreement with South Africa; Cone Textiles liquidated in 1994, shedding 6000 workers. Adding to the predicament of the industry, the government denied ZCTU participation in the negotiations with South Africa on a new trade agreement, while the South African side did include the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) (which, in turn, made common cause with the ZCTU on a social clause). Economic prospects continued to worsen into 1995, with increases in the price of petrol (7.3%) and diesel (20%) in January; with the government announcing its intention to introduce a Drought Levy of 5% with effect from April; and with the ZCTU threatening, in turn, to carry out a national strike. This sequence of events was finally to bring President Mugabe and the labour leaders together in a landmark meeting in March 1995, signalling a possible thawing of relations between state and labour.
Mobilisation and democratisation
The ability of the trade unions to represent workers in national life was undermined by the perennial organisational problems inherent in a semi-proletarianised, migrant, and poor workforce. In the early 1990s, two surveys were conducted within the labour movement to assess the status of union organisation and to devise strategies for mobilisation and democratisation (Gregory et al. 1991; Chibatwa et al. 1993). As one of the survey reports acknowledged in the outset, ‘trade unions are grass-roots movements’, and thus, ‘their strength is derived from the confidence and support they enjoy from the ordinary workers who labour in the factories, mines, plantations and other enterprises’ (Gregory et al. 1991, 11). The assessment of this confidence and support confirmed the magnitude of the organisational task at hand. Two more evaluations of the movement were conducted in 1996–1997 (Sibanda 1996; Mihyo and Powel 1997).
Taken together, the early surveys found that workers generally lacked information on the unions in their sectors and the work that these carry out. Workers had a low level of understanding of how wages were determined and also a low level of awareness of their legal rights and what constituted ‘unfair labour practices’. Workers who were members of workers' committees were more aware of such matters, but workers' committees were themselves weak. The committees often lacked constitutions, or workers were simply not aware of them, held general meetings infrequently, and also met infrequently with union officials. Although general meetings organised by the committees tended to be well attended, the question of wages, as expected, monopolised the agenda, but without further issues gaining sufficient hearing, and without workers' concerns more generally being linked to broader macro-level issues. Worker representatives, furthermore, were ineffectively representing workers' concerns to management, acting instead as a vehicle of information from management to workers. Gender discrimination was found to be total, insofar as women were absent from executive positions on the committees. Thus, workers' representatives and committees were not playing the requisite role on matters of conscientisation, recruitment, democratisation, representation to management, and communication with unions. Meetings organised by unions themselves at branch level were less effective, as they were poorly attended. In this case, impediments to attendance included lack of notification of workers, lack of time, fear of victimisation by employers, and lack of confidence in the ability of unions to increase wages.
Thus, the strengthening of shop floor structures, as well as their incorporation into union structures, was recognised as an organisational imperative. A parallel task was the broadening of the membership and economic base of the movement in order to gain self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining mobilisational and educational effort. The precise strategy at the turn of the decade, as announced by the Secretary General, was twofold, involving, on the one hand, a comprehensive education and mobilisation campaign with the stated aim of increasing the unionisation rate to 50%, and, on the other hand, the administrative enforcement of subscription payments by affiliate unions to the national centre (TW 1: March 1993).
Towards the first end, a workers' education (APADEP) programme that had been ongoing since 1984 – with the support of the Dutch FNV and the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague – was honed, after 1987, to the specific needs of Zimbabwean workers. Course materials began to be developed by the ZCTU in 1989, and by 1990 the first edition of the home-grown Workers' Participation and Education manual was produced. This became the main guide in seminars and instructors' courses. Union branch officials, workers' committee representatives, and trade union activists were recruited into the education programme in this period. An evaluation of the programme conducted in 1997 noted that between 1991 and 1996, 569 persons were trained, 25% of whom were women, further noting that attendance had been lower than projected, especially that of women (Mihyo and Powel 1997). Nonetheless, the evaluation noted that the centre and its affiliate network had built considerable education capacity and capacity-building potential. The specialised training of trade union cadres was also undertaken with a view to improve skills in collective bargaining, grievance handling, basic economic and legal issues, and financial administration. This arose as a pressing need when the movement began to distance itself from the state in the late 1980s. By 1992, however, only 25 paralegals had been trained in the movement, with 4% of these being at the shop floor, 32% at branch level, 8% at the regional, and 56% at the national; on the economic side, 21 cadres had been trained, most of them at national level (Chibatwa et al. 1993, 31–32).
Building stronger links between the unions and the shop floor also entailed an active policy of incorporating workers' committees into union structures by supporting the placement of union members into the committees. The 1996 survey noted that 93% of enterprises had workers' committees, up from 90% in 1991/92, but that there unionisation of committee members was not yet total (Sibanda 1996). The survey also noted that the victimisation of committee members continued to be extensive, rendering the unionisation of committees all the more urgent (Sibanda 1996: 14). Alongside the tapping of committees, the labour centre decentralised its organisation in 1992 by creating six regional offices (in Mutare, Masvingo, Bulawayo, Gweru, Chinhoyi, and Harare) and district committees below them to coordinate activities and to improve communication with the grassroots. The educational programme itself contributed to the process, by conscientising non-unionised workers and by building organisational capacity among affiliates and between affiliates and the centre.
Nonetheless, unions continued to find themselves in a low-membership/low-resource trap, hindering their educational and organisational efforts, and creating foreign dependence. Figures on membership in this period are generally elusive. One of the surveys above stated that, in 1993, one-third of men and less than one-tenth of women were unionised, while the overall unionisation level stood at 41% of the work force (Chibatwa et al. 1993, 26). The latter figure is not convincing, however, as it would suggest that the Zimbabwean labour movement had already attained the organisational status of much more established movements (both in Africa and Europe). A more realistic figure was provided in 1993 by The Worker which reported that total membership amounted to 201,800 workers (TW 2: April 1993). This figure was likely to be an underestimation of the real membership, however, given that unions routinely under-reported their memberships in order to evade the subscription fees that they owed to the national centre. The real unionisation rate was likely to be around 20%. Despite retrenchments throughout the ESAP period, during which the unionisation numbers ebbed and flowed, the unions managed to close the decade again with a 20% real unionisation rate, according to the Accounts Department, with 196,200 members actually declared by unions, but possibly twice as many workers in reality belonging to unions.4 Notwithstanding the realities of membership, the financial constraints associated with a declared membership of 196,200 were enormous. The union centre remained underfunded and dependent on foreign donors. In 1997, only one-third of the centre's budget derived from subscription fees, while as much as two-thirds derived from donors, thereby exposing the labour centre to external interference (Kudenga and Co. 1997).
Relations between the national centre and its affiliates were not devoid of acrimony. The non-payment of subscription fees by affiliate unions to the national centre was a source of ongoing conflict. In 1992, less than one-third of the affiliates (10 of 35) were paid up, with a total of Z$270,000 owed to the centre. Among the non-compliant unions were those which rejected the increase in fees (from 5 to 15 cents per member) that had been legislated at the 1990 Congress, on the grounds of economic hardship. Such claims, however, were not entirely convincing to the national centre. While the centre appreciated that under the harsh economic climate some unions would face financial difficulties, which in turn it would take into consideration, it also believed that some unionists had ulterior motives. The dispute reached a low point when dissenting unionists sought the intervention of the Ministry of Labour on their behalf – and giving the state the opportunity to pursue divide-and-rule policies. The labour centre responded by issuing ultimatums to the non-compliant unions to pay up or face suspension. The problem was not to have an easy resolution. By 1933, only two more affiliates had met their obligations, bringing the number to 12, while no suspensions had been carried out. In January 1994, the General Council convened a special meeting at which it renewed its ultimatum, giving unions three more months to pay up. Clearly, the non-compliance of unions, combined with the underdeclaration of membership, was jeopardising the viability of the centre. In fact, the latter was resorting to borrowing funds from its donor-funded and earmarked project accounts. By 1995, the financial position of the centre was in trouble, with almost Z$500,000 owed to its project accounts and Z$78,998 owed to the AFL-CIO's African American Labor Centre (TW 29: October 1995).
While under-reporting, evasion, and more genuine economic distress on the part of affiliates were at the crux of the financial problem, it is also true that the problem was compounded by the excessive number of unions in existence and the failure of the centre itself to promote amalgamations in allied industries. There had been well over 30 unions in existence throughout the decade, some of which gained recognition despite their being too small and weak to operate effectively. At its 1990 Congress the labour movement resolved to pursue mergers as a matter of urgency, yet by the close of the decade the national centre continued to be excessively segmented, with 38 unions on its roster. The multiplicity of unions has detracted from the ability of the movement to reap economies of scale across allied industries, reduce administrative costs, and meet obligations to the national centre – and not least from the ability to mobilise workers in larger numbers and represent them more effectively. The fragmentation owed partly to the lack of resolve on the part of the national leadership in desisting from registering splintering and non-credible unions (Editorial comment, TW 27: August 1995). It owed also to the lack of sufficient authority on the part of the centre to push through mergers without fear of unions going it alone or, worse, defecting to the state-endorsed Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions (ZFTU). This also suggests that the patronage motive within the movement had not been eradicated.
Given such internal divisions, financial matters came to occupy the top of the centre's agenda at its 1995 Congress. Besides being the ‘Beyond ESAP’ Congress, it was also dubbed the ‘make or break’ Congress, and coincided with negotiations between the ZCTU and the large and well-organised civil servants' unions, ZIMTA and PSA, for the possible affiliation of the latter two. The ZCTU had thus to put its house in order. The tone was set at a General Council meeting prior to the Congress, where it was agreed that five particularly non-complaint affiliates would be only be accorded observer status at the Congress. The tone was set, furthermore, with a prior report issued by the General Council's on the challenges to be confronted (TW 29: October 1995):
Disrupted coordination and communication between the ZCTU and affiliates diverted attention, work and time away from more serious issues confronting workers and deprived the ZCTU of the financial viability needed to meet those serious issues. It produced uncomradely, undemocratic and unprincipled behaviour resulting in some persons using outside parties to resolve disputes before the internal, democratic organs of the ZCTU had been used or exhausted.
Despite the new measures, as well as the eventual affiliation of PSA in August 1996, financial difficulties continued to haunt the labour centre throughout the remainder of the decade. In March 1996, The Worker reported that 11 non-complaint affiliates were no longer being invited to partake in activities organised by the centre (TW 33: March 1996). In June 1996, labour leaders convened a meeting in Nyanga to map out a five-year strategy on, inter alia, achieving self-sufficiency. In January 1997, dues were again increased from 40 cents to Z$1 under the pressure of inflation. And, in August 1997, Tsvangirai was once again threatening defaulters with expulsion, but with the exception of those with ‘genuine’ financial problems, including the PSA (TW 43: February 1997 and TW 49: August 1997). With regards to amalgamations, the inducement mechanism proved insufficient to the task, as the centre closed the decade with 38 affiliates. In the context of liberalisation, more resolve would have been required to stem the splintering of unions and actually reverse their proliferation. One notable victim of the decade was the National Union of Clothing Industry (NUCI), which splintered after a combination of massive job losses (13,000) in the industry in 1997, loss of faith by the workers in the ability of NUCI to represent them, and infighting within the leadership. NUCI splintered in 1999, giving rise to the Clothing Industry Workers Union (CIWU), which, however, was not recognised.
Internal divisions between the centre and its affiliates were not confined to one-way grievances by the centre against affiliates. Affiliates had grievances of their own, and these related to the perceived heavy-handed tactics of the leadership and the aloofness of the centre's staff. Grievances against the leadership surfaced at the 1995 Congress, when the General Council sought to expand the number of vice-presidents from three to five, with a view to accommodate the powerful ZIMTA and PSA within the ZCTU. After heated debate, over one-third of the delegates (the number required to arrest a Constitutional amendment) rejected the proposal. The dissenting delegates went on to call on the leadership to revamp itself and become more efficient, rather than bloating its structures for purposes of political accommodation. At the same Congress, the office of First Assistant Secretary General was won by a newcomer, Isidore Zindoga (of the Leather, Shoe and Allied Workers Union) prevailing over the incumbent, Nicholas Mudzengerere, in a victory seen as providing a check on the leadership. Finally, grievances were again voiced at a meeting of labour leaders in Nyanga in June 1996, when certain among the centre's staff were accused of being uncooperative, even ‘untouchable’ (TW 37: July 1996).
One of the major weaknesses of the movement was the gross under-representation of women in the membership and the leadership. This was first acknowledged in 1985, when the ZCTU adopted a resolution to establish a Women's Desk, mandated with the promotion of gender equity within the movement. In 1986, the Women's Desk organised a workshop with women representatives from each trade union to map a way forward. The delegates recommended that branch committees be formed and educational and training programmes be established. The recommendations were accepted by the General Council and 16 committees were established around the country soon after. In 1987, a ZCTU Women's Council was formed from the 16 committees, and this met for the first time in Masvingo to issue the Masvingo Declaration of Women's Activities, which set the terms of reference of the Council and its programmes. Also in 1987, a 10-year education programme was initiated with funding from Norway; by 1992, some 4500 women from all affiliates had received training in seminars and workshops on a range of matters, including trade union functions, ESAP, collective bargaining, grievance handling, women and leadership, and fundamental rights (Pswarai 1992).
In 1992, women representatives from affiliates met in Chinhoyi to map out the further strategy for conscientisation and mobilisation. In the same year, the Women's Advisory Council (WAC), which had been created by constitutional amendment at the 1990 Congress, was established as an integral part of the ZCTU's executive with a mandate to ensure that women were represented at all levels of the organisation. In 1998, a Gender Perspective Team was established which comprised of an equal number of men and women and which was tasked with developing training material and accelerating gender balance. In January 1999, finally, the Education and Women's Departments were merged, under the logic that, by this time, much of the gender programme had been incorporated satisfactorily into union structures.
While the centre was indeed moving in the right direction on gender issues, real progress on the ground was much slower. On the one hand, there existed an ongoing education and mobilisation programme that reached out to mobilise and sensitise the rank and file. This received, furthermore, an institutional boost by the formation of WAC and the Gender Perspective Team. On the other hand, the culture of male dominance had been hard to break. As the 1997 evaluation later concluded, ‘unions generally tend to project that unions are for men. The culture of union organisation and mobilisation centres around the ideology of brotherhood as opposed to comradeship’ (Mihyo and Powell 1997, 28). Women continued to be grossly under-represented in leadership structures and in the membership. By 1997, there were only two women in leadership positions at the union level, as president and vice-president of unions; and only one woman at the national level, as Third Vice President, elected at the 1995 Congress. Furthermore, it was pointed out that women had not actually been receiving equal access to workshops and seminars. This had been the case either because the courses had often been conducted outside working hours, thereby overlooking the needs of working mothers and preventing women from gaining the necessary education to move up through the structures (Mutambanengwe 1997); or because they had not focused sufficiently on the sectors where women workers are concentrated, as in agriculture (Mihyo and Powell 1997, 27). Finally, by decade's end, there were no statistics on women's membership.5 The Economics Department itself had been slow to produce research on gender, devoting a paper to gender issues in 1998 (Kanyenze 1998) and planning to include a chapter on gender in its Beyond ESAP II study prepared for 2000. And the ZCTU-sponsored book, Keep on Knocking, on the history of the labour movement did not bring out the gender dimension sufficiently. The generally slow progress on the status of women in the ZCTU became an issue, in fact, during the affiliation negotiations with the public service associations, when the President of the Zimbabwe Nurses Association, predominantly composed of women, voiced concern and called for more favourable policies on women's issues (TW 34: April 1996).
Much less of an issue in the labour movement had been the ethnic dimension of Zimbabwean politics. Ethnic politics had been neutralised to a large extent by the fact that the national leadership for over a decade had a president of Ndebele origin and a general secretary of Shona origin. Nonetheless, the issue was not entirely laid to rest. While ethnic politics within the labour movement may not have held much sway since the independence of the labour centre from the ruling party, the question of ethnic representation did arise in relation to the leadership of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) (The Zimbabwe Mirror, January 21–27), the opposition party spearheaded by the ZCTU in 1999, suggesting that, in times of power restructuring, issues of ethnicity were capable of resurfacing.
Finally, it is important to round off the mobilisation/democratisation profile by indicating that the labour centre confronted the ongoing challenges of ESAP by adopting non-conventional strategies and reaching out to new constituencies. One of the new strategies was to reach out to youth, both employed and unemployed, and to organise youth structures within the labour movement so as to conscientise them and give them a voice in the working class. To this end, in February 1995 in Chitungwiza, a conference was organised jointly by ZCTU and ICFTU/AFRO on issues facing young workers. This was a follow-up conference on the World Youth Rally held in Kingston, Jamaica in 1992, which the ZCTU had attended. The Chitungwiza conference called for the creation of structures and representation at all levels and for an educational programme on a broad array of issues, including gender, unemployment, training opportunities, alcohol and drug abuse, and HIV/AIDS. Thereafter, workshops were organised nationwide with the support of ICFTU/AFRO, drawing participants from affiliates and between the ages of 18 and 35 years.
Another strategy, which was of longer lineage but which began to bear fruit in the late 1990s, was the unification of workers across public and private sectors. One approach was to intervene in the labour law deliberations and demand the harmonisation of private and public sector labour laws. The other was to go ahead and affiliate civil servants in spite of the legal segregation. At the union level, the first such unification occurred in 1994 when the Zimbabwe Construction and Allied Trade Workers' Union (ZCATWU), whose membership had dropped from an all-time high of 43,000 in 1993 to 15,000 in 1995, succeeded in incorporating workers in the Ministry of Public Construction and National Housing (TW 28: September 1995). This was followed in August 1996, at the height of the public servants' strike, by the full-scale incorporation of the PSA into the ZCTU, which boosted the labour movement in both numbers (47,000 PSA members in 1999) and confidence.
Finally, the ZCTU sought to build solidarity with the unemployed and workers in the informal sector, by engaging the Zimbabwe Unemployed and Retrenchees Organisation (ZURO) and the Informal Traders Association of Zimbabwe (ITAZ). The labour centre's constitution allowed for these organisations to join as associate members and with observer status on the General Council. Progress in this regard had been lacking, however. The ZCTU devoted some funds towards organising these constituencies but found it very difficult, due to leadership problems and lack of consistency on the part of the latter. Moreover, with the advent of MDC and the reorientation of the ZCTU towards the political cause, the prospects of refocusing energies on organising informal sector workers and the unemployed were abandoned.
Conclusion
The emergence of the labour movement in the first half of the 1990s established a new relation of forces in the country. The ZCTU was the most formidable organised force to challenge neoliberalism. Yet, the centre continued to have crippling weaknesses. The tables began to turn when these weaknesses prevailed, at the same time as a new radical force emerged from among the war veterans and the rural-based semi-proletariat to challenge neoliberalism on the basis of a re-radicalised nationalism and a strategy of direct action on the farms (Moyo 2001; Moyo and Yeros 2005; Sadomba 2011).
The radical political unionism of the labour centre was essentially voluntarist, if we were to judge by its structural weaknesses. It has been argued that:
… while the imagining of a socialist alternative was never an organic part of the ZCTU's agenda and probably occupied the strategic thinking of only a small section of the leadership in the early 1990s, it provided the organisational space for criticism of the dominant state nationalism. (Raftopoulos and Sachikonye 2001b, xxi–xxii, italics added)
In the meantime, the centre underwent deep transformation, as it was increasingly absorbed into a limiting ‘democratisation’ critique, within the parameters promoted by foreign donors.
Note on contributor
Paris Yeros is Adjunct Professor of International Economics at the Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil. He is Research Associate of the African Institute of Agrarian Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe, and a member of the Editorial Board of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.