Build Direct Links with the Workers’ Movement in Other Countries!

Originally published in Inqaba ya Basebenzi No.6 (May 1982)

by Paul Storey

In building workers’ unity workers have found it necessary to do more than link their organisations together ‘at the top’. In each region and industry, we strive to meet with our fellow workers from other factories and unions to discuss directly how we can organise and fight together against our common enemy.

Workers’ unity means direct links between workers at every level, from the factory floor to the trade union headquarters.

Exactly the same applies to building unity with our fellow workers in other countries. Effective solidarity depends on direct links.

This is instinctively grasped by workers. It is as plain as daylight to the activists fighting to build the independent non-racial unions in South Africa.

But it is not clearly understood in the overseas anti-apartheid circles campaigning for sanctions against the SA regime.

Unbelievably the idea has crept in that to cut-off support for our oppressors and exploiters, it is necessary also to stop direct links between the SA workers and the workers overseas! To isolate the slave-owners, apparently the slaves must also be left locked-up.

Good Step

Because this mistake has become quite prevalent, the independent unions ought to explain the correct position on direct links to supporters of our movement abroad.

A good step in this direction was the statement by three Fosatu affiliates last October (see box). However, their position was not publicised by the anti-apartheid or trade union leaders overseas.

Fosatu Affiliates’ Statement

On 22 October 1981 NUMARWOSA (now in NAAWU), the EAWU and MAWU issued a press statement. It concerned the cancellation of the visit to SA by Bill Sirs, General Secretary of the British steelworkers union (ISTC) and Terry Duffy, President of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. This visit had been set up through the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF).

These three independent non-racial unions, affiliates of the IMF, had opposed this visit “because of the statements made by Sirs before the visit” which were felt “to be insulting and ill-informed when he spoke of bringing black workers out of the ‘dark ages’. Subsequently the visit was cancelled.

At the same time the three unions made clear their principles on fraternal contact between unions:

We strongly favour fraternal contact between workers in SA and workers in other countries at all levels, provided this is guided by the interests and requirements of workers. Visits to SA and visits overseas should be based on the concrete needs of workers. Visits should involve not only top officials, but also plant-based worker representatives.

The aims of these visits should be to strengthen fraternal ties between organised workers in different countries and to carry forward the struggle for workers in SA to win the same rights as have been won by workers in other countries.

Several visits to and from our unions have already taken place, with shop stewards and union officials from Europe visiting unions and factories in SA and shop stewards and officials from our unions travelling to Europe and the USA. This contact has been valuable and will be encouraged in the future, provided it takes place in accordance with the above principles and guidelines.

It might seem that such an obvious matter as direct worker links should be easy to straighten out. However, the situation is made more difficult because the leadership of Sactu in exile – despite all arguments and appeals – persists in opposing direct links.

We reproduce here Sactu’s statement entitled “Direct Links Stinks!” from its official paper, Workers’ Unity. Every point of substance in it was dealt with in advance in Inqaba No. 4 (October 1981). Here we can sum it up:

• On the danger of visitors trying to “lead us astray”: The oppressed workers in South Africa are capable of exercising vigilance, through their unions, against the treachery of false friends! We support genuine worker-to-worker links aimed to mobilise joint action and concrete support against a common enemy – the bosses and their governments. We oppose visits by those who are not prepared to join in this struggle.

• On the risk of arrests: This should not be underestimated, nor exaggerated. Every serious step in building the workers’ movement has involved such risks and will continue to do so. Our union activists are at risk every day. Those involved in each struggle can best weigh-up the wisdom of each specific visit or action. The surest defence against our oppressors is to organise the greatest forces against them – here and abroad!

• On the danger of exposing underground organisation to the police: No-one with brains in his head is calling for visiting trade unionists to be introduced to “the underground”. The point is to build open links wherever possible between the open trade unions.

• On the reformism of Western trade union leaders: This is no argument against direct links. On the contrary it strengthens the case for direct links between the workers themselves.

Nor is it enough to go about in suit and tie, shaking hands with these same union leaders, winning verbal and financial support – and leaving it at that.

Everywhere the crisis of capitalism is moving workers into struggle against the bosses and their governments. The activists are fighting to equip the labour organisations with a programme and leadership equal to the battles ahead.

Solidarity is not a one-way street. We must roll up our sleeves and join forces with the rank-and-file workers in other countries, seeking common action in struggle.

That is the task of the Sactu leaders also.

• On the danger that direct links will “bypass” the Congress movement: Today the workers are raising the banner of Congress beside the banners of the independent unions. Why is it imagined that direct links between these workers and their counterparts abroad will “bypass” the Congress movement?

The only danger is that, if the Sactu leaders continue to turn their backs on the vital need for direct links – then they will do Sactu itself an irreparable damage.

The duty of all Congress leaders is to actively support in every way the campaign for direct links.

In October 1981 we warned: “A wrong position on these issues can only disrupt the painstaking efforts by workers inside the country to broaden their struggle internationally. We urge the Sactu leadership to reconsider its position before serious damage is done.”

Unfortunately, the first such damage was not long in coming.

SAAWU, fighting to raise support for the Wilson-Rowntree strike, appealed to the British Transport and General Workers’ Union to send a delegation to SA to meet the workers and discuss concrete solidarity. The TGWU, with over two million members, has the undoubted muscle to force the capitulation of the management.

But the TGWU leaders have not yet used this muscle. They refused SAAWU’s request, thus seriously weakening the position of the strikers.

The General Secretary of the TGWU claimed in writing on 22 February that the union’s position “has the support of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the African National Congress as well as those bodies that genuinely support the cause of liberation in South Africa.”

Within the TGWU active members are calling on the leadership to change its position and take up SAAWU’s appeal.

Within our own movement, the necessary conclusions must be drawn. The magnificent movement of the last ten years has been built by countless initiatives of youth and workers, rediscovering their own strength. These same qualities will build an unconquerable movement of workers’ solidarity internationally.

Comrades of the Congress leadership, it is necessary to change course.

Let us base ourselves on the slogan of Marx and Engels, confirmed by all the experience of the international labour movement: “Workers of all countries, unite”!

Come out publicly for direct links and no major union internationally will stand against it. That is your duty to the workers.

‘Direct Links’ – Stinks!

From Workers Unity, Issue No. 30, April 1982:

We are not new to the struggle. We have a history. We have memories of battles – of those who helped us and those who betrayed us, and of those who tried to lead us astray.

There were people from England and from Brussels who asked us not to take part in politics and offered us money. We rejected them. So they used their money for big stooges whose names are remembered only by historians.

There are new visitors who offer money, education, help of all kinds if we will give up following the Congress movement. Over the years we have educated ourselves, we have tried many ways, many paths, our families have starved in order that we may organise ourselves, we have given up our lives to build the Congress movement, why should we give it up now?

A new tokolosh has appeared. This new voice is dressed in new clothes. It carries a red flag. It talks of Marxism. It cries revolution, but if you listen carefully, it sings the same tune – give up following Congress, follow us. They try to trick us with a new slogan ‘direct links’. They say trade unionists from Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany and other capitalist countries should come to visit us in our South African prison and we should visit them in America or wherever.

The Special Branch stands at the gate of our prison – at the borders and the airport. All who enter or leave are controlled and followed. Rita Ndzanga and Emma Mashinini who travelled overseas and Sean Hosey who came to South Africa all ended in jail. It is true, not all who visit us are arrested but then we ask the question, why? It is because they are doing what the Special Branch wants them to do and are acting as a lead to us in the underground or because your reformism does not threaten the regime. Why do you visit us? It does us no good and puts us and our organisation in jeopardy.

It is difficult for some to refuse your invitations to America or Britain. But what can we learn there? What can the AFL-CIO teach us about revolution. We don’t need lessons in class collaboration!

‘Direct links’ an apparently reasonable slogan: in fact, in practice, we have already long-established direct links between the workers of South Africa and the world. There is hardly a country in the world that a Sactu speaker and organiser has not visited except those where the workers are not free to receive us, such as Chile or El Salvador. There is no trade union organisation from which support has been offered that Sactu has not channelled that support to the workers and their organisations in South Africa.

It is not that these new voices want direct links, it is that they want to bypass the peoples’ revolutionary organisations, the ANC (SA) and Sactu. Such actions can only create divisions. It is not Sactu that picks and chooses which strikes or trade unions to support in South Africa, it is those who call for direct links who pick and choose. It is well known that certain people, certain trade unionists, in South Africa are paid and supported by internal and external forces who are against our revolution. Lucy Mvubelo is only one such a person.

If overseas trade union bodies want to work for unity in South Africa then let them ensure that their aid, their money goes to all the trade unions not only those which accept their aid along with their reformist philosophy. Apartheid is beyond reform.

‘Direct links’ are nothing more nor less than a new form of colonialism in which the far Left joins the far Right in opposing the Congress movement in South Africa.