Durban will mark the 50th anniversary of the Durban Strikes in January 2023. When the now-famous strikes broke out in January 1973, the ANC in exile was as shocked as the apartheid state. Neither of the two contending forces had had any sense that black workers would organise themselves.

The strikes soon connected to the university, with charismatic academic Rick Turner, who had a close relationship with Steve Biko, building a bridge between the campus of the old University of Natal and the factories. Harriet Bolton, Durban’s legendary trade unionist, and students such as David Hemson and others also got involved in the emerging trade union movement.

By 1979, the new unions that had emerged from the 1973 strikes merged into a new federation, Fosatu. It was independent of the ANC and warned that, without independently organised workers, the ANC could well, like other national liberation movements, sell out the workers when it took power.

In 1985, Fosatu was dissolved and Cosatu was launched in Durban, with Jay Naidoo as first general secretary of the new federation.

Cosatu was aligned with the ANC and, along with the UDF, played a major role in battering down the doors of the apartheid fortress so that the ANC could return from exile. This history is not known by many younger people, who labour under the entirely false impression that the armed struggle defeated apartheid.

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In the second half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the trade unions were a powerful force. That power is now much reduced. We saw this, painfully, last week when the “national shutdown” called by Cosatu and Saftu failed.

A motley collection of small gatherings in a few cities is far from being a shutdown of any kind, let alone a national shutdown. It was a far cry from the 1980s and 1990s when unions could shut down the national economy, and always carried the influence that comes with that sort of power.

No organisational muscle

The failure of the national shutdown shows that neither Cosatu nor Saftu has the organisational muscle to pull off a major national intervention. It also shows that Zwelinzima Vavi, who was the face of the shutdown, does not have the personal standing to make major political interventions.

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Vavi is seen as a possible leader of a new left party by many in the NGO world, but it is clear that he doesn’t have the popular support to be our Lula da Silva.

Numsa, the largest union in South Africa and the only union rapidly winning members in new sectors, did not support the shutdown.

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There are now four major groups in the working-class movement. Cosatu remains aligned to the ANC, whereas Saftu is politically independent. Numsa is the only union with any real numerical and financial power in Saftu, but with a total breakdown in the relationship between both Vavi and the NGO networks with which he is associated and the Numsa leadership, it doesn’t really make sense to see Numsa as a committed player in Saftu. And then, of course, there’s Amcu, which has been bleeding members to Numsa for years, and is also outside both Cosatu and Saftu.

The unity that was built after the 1973 Durban Strikes, first in the form of Fosatu and then Cosatu, is now shattered, with four or five major groupings among the organised working class.

Although the shutdown was a failure in terms of winning support among workers, it is interesting and perhaps important that Cosatu and Saftu were able to work together.

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It is not easy, though, to see Numsa’s leadership working with Vavi or to see Amcu working with any other organisations.

There does not seem to be an easy way to rebuild the unity among the organised working class that emerged from the Durban Strikes, a unity that shook the foundations of apartheid. But without some sort of way of working together, the pincer movement of corruption and neoliberalism will continue to crush the working class and the poor. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.