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There is also the risk that, given economic and political constraints on the new government’s capacity to deliver in practice, the response from government would be premised on uniformity at the lowest level. Unions with established health care arrangements and a powerful base for bargaining with employers would be reluctant to surrender hard won gains in return for a least common denominator outcome.
Management of health care
Though the bilateral structure of bargaining may be familiar, health care brings new challenges to the process: when the scope of bargaining is extended beyond the division of the costs of health care to the restructuring of the content and delivery of that care, unions enter uncharted territory and encounter new parties, with whom they have to develop relationships. Health care professionals and consultants enter the picture, along with financial intermediaries (such as medical aid administrators and managed care enterprises). Dealing with these different and potentially conflicting groups presents trade unions with particular problems. The imbalance of technical knowledge and expertise in a specialised area can be crippling for a union, rendering it vulnerable to manipulation by vested interests. On the other hand, gaining the expertise necessary to negotiate with specialists on relatively equal terms can result in over-concentration of skills in a small group of full time officials, cutting other officials and, more particularly, worker leadership out of the negotiating process and distancing the membership from the issue. The challenge is to retain a reasonable degree of worker control of the issue, so that it docs not become a technical question only, while
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at the same time ensuring that union negotiators can hold their own against specialists, rather than being forced onto the defensive.
In most countries, health insurance schemes are managed and administered independently of unions or bargaining structures and their relationships with unions or employers are at arms length. This thesis focuses on the unusual phenomenon of schemes which are jointly managed by unions and employers within an industry. This is a much closer relationship, particularly when the schemes run their own health services, rather than simply contracting with private providers. The trade unions involved have to develop a set of relationships, as employers, specifically as employers of professionals, and even more specifically, of medical professionals, one of the most hierarchically organised, minutely divided and professionalistic of groups (Doyal 1983; Swartz 1993).
Employment relations inside trade unions can be complex, embodying a conflict between the rights of union employees as workers and the rights of the membership whom they serve. The relationship with medical professionals is even more problematic. They have a right to express demands to their ‘employer’ (the joint management structure, in which the union participates) and are likely to be particularly demanding on the basis of professional status. The union as joint ‘employer’ is in turn accountable to and employed by its members, with whose interests the professional demands conflict. How will unions manage to be at one and the same time employers of the medical staff and representative; of the workers who rely on the services they
provide? Unions have to intervene in a number of relationships to facilitate a shift in the balance of power: within the group of medical professionals (the weh of medical manager-doctor-nurse relationships) and, more importantly, between them and the union’s members, in order to increase those members’ involvement in their own health care. There is a significant imbalance in power between health care professionals and users. Health care is not an ordinary consumer good: you cannot be certain when you will need it or how great your need will be. When you do need it, you are vulnerable because of pain and/or fear and reliant on advice and decisions which you lack the expertise or vocabulary to challenge. You are also usually alone. On the face of it, this would seem to be a very difficult area for trade unions to enter, requiring intervention in an individualised and confidential relationship.
7. Conclusion
The central task for unions is to maintain the ’union’ character of their health services in the face of a number of conflicting pressures. The involvement of professionals gives them a stake in the process and results in pressures towards ‘efficiency’ and professionalisation. There are competing demands for union leaders’ involvement, which may result in withdrawal from involvement once the decisions are made. This is problematic because health service developments need ongoing union involvement in the implementation of decisions and monitoring of outcomes to ensure that they do not revert to professional control as a result of losing the vital contact with their user/members. As the health system develops, it places increasing demands
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on the lay management structures. In order to manage appropriately, representatives need skills, training, experience and continuity, which can centralise decision-making power in the hand of a small group of union ‘experts’.
There is a continuing tension between the need to highlight health care as an issue, recognising the importance of appropriate union structures and procedures, and the need to locate it as a union issue like any other and one that is intimately related to the mainline issues of wages and working conditions, in terms of their impact on health status. Health care must not overtake health as the central union concern.
The Sick Funds which are the subject of the first three studies in this thesis operated in an uneasy middle ground between private and public sector. They provided access the private sector via a system of contracted private (panel) doctors (though in the second-class queue), sometimes supplemented by simple primary clinics. Sick Fund members, unlike members of most other medical schemes, shift between private and public sector care. For secondary and tertiary care, they used the public sector.
I argue that it is possible to reclaim this middle ground and to create funds which are public in form, though technically private, by transforming the existing clinics and using them as the base for an expanded system of neighbourhood primary health care centres, employing medical staff to operate them under the control of Sick Fund structures, and developing strong relationships with state health services for secondary and tertiary referral. Such funds protect members from the inflationary
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spiral of private medicine. Though they arc part of a tiered system, privileging members above workers with no health cover and the unemployed, the differences arc less acute than with medical aid. The style of the services is similar to public sector services, the major difference being the degree of control which the users, via their representatives, can exert. It would be romantic to characterise this as 'worker control’, but it is at least worker influence. The next chapter describes the process of restructuring a Sick Fund for clothing workers in Cape Town with the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union.
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Chapter 4.
The Cape Clothing Industry Sick Fund
1. Introduction
The focus of this chapter is on a trade union project: its origin, development, implementation and outcome. This project was informed by a broader purpose among a key group of new trade union leaders, engaged in a broad process of renewal within the union, one thrust of which involved the process of restructuring members’ health care (on renewal, see Fairbrother 1996). The union had more than 48,000 workers, members of the Sick Fund, the overwhelming majority coloured women. They were spread over 399 factories in the Western Cape, the majority in small and very small factories, earning low wages.
The nature of the state and the political environment influences the way in which unions function. When this project began, the South African state was still constituted on racist lines and unsympathetic to the organised working class. This situation combined with a legacy of state resistance to independent trade unions and the vacuum in formal party politics for black South Africans (legal parties were discredited, credible parties were illegal) to politicise a significant part of the trade union movement and broaden the scope of union activity and responsibility. In the
1980s the state was intent on dismantling the remaining elements of intervention and protectionism in the economic system. In health care, the decay of the state health system and rampant inflation in the private health sector fuelled worker
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dissatisfaction. At this juncture, it was obvious that the state would not respond to demands for improvements in public sector health care.
This pressure intersected positively with an organisational imperative. The union project was undertaken to legitimate and concretise an existing union agenda, an agenda which was in turn closely linked to the need to legitimate and establish a new leadership. The new leaders moved beyond the defence of historic benefits, extending and improving them, and entered political terrain by asserting the union’s right to involvement beyond bargaining over the division of the costs of health care into the new area of design and management of health services for their members. Locating the issue in the familiar structure of bargaining required conscious weighting in relation to other issues being pursued simultaneously, tested commitment and allowed for delays in return for key concessions.
Workers looked to their union for assistance. Union leaders made a strategic decision to develop the project within the bilateral framework of the existing Sick Fund management structure, translating a union policy document into a joint project shared with employers (GAWU 1989). They believed that this would require the appointment of an independent ‘expert’ acceptable to both parties to research the Sick Fund and present proposals for its restructuring for negotiation by the parties.1
The study traces the way in which the issue was defined, related demands articulated and embedded, and membership commitment secured in order to
1 In all four studies, I was nominated by a trade union to act as consultant to both parties (trade unions and employers): this was then agreed by the employer/s (and by the other trade unions in the two multi-union studies). Differences in the extent and nature of my involvement are highlighted in the studies and discussed in more detail in the methodology appendix.
support the leadership in the bargaining process. The union leadership’s investment in the project kept the issue on the bargaining agenda and resulted in the negotiation of crucial agreements, in which delays were conceded at terms and times advantageous to the union project.
Unlike the other studies, it contained within it a formal piece of planned research, in the form of a sample survey. The original research plan was constantly modified in response to a volatile situation, incorporating new developments and demands and shifting its timetable and pace to accommodate the rhythms of the industrial relations negotiating process. My involvement extended beyond the formal study, developing from internal work in the union started some four years prior to the study, and including an intense two-year period of involvement in the process of implementing the recommendations.
This first study focuses particularly on the possibilities for union action on health care, while those which follow highlight the constraints and limitations. This chapter charts the way in which a ‘great notion’, as expressed in the union’s internal policy document, was brought to the bargaining table, legitimated by ‘independent research’, paced by the collective bargaining process, and then implemented in a process subject to the checks and challenges of the joint management process (GAWU 1989). In the process, a model for working class health care provision emerges: this is - crucially - not a technical model which can be transferred with case, but rather a model of process, which is founded on struggle.
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2. Origin: the union agenda
The impetus for union renewal may come from different sources:
membership dissatisfaction and pressure, shills within the leadership, entry of new leaders, external forces, and any combination of these. New leaders must distinguish themselves from the old order where this is problematic, but identify and lay claim to the elements of tradition which attract the loyalty of members. To do this, they must define an agenda for action which builds on these issues. In order to understand this project it is necessary to understand the ideological weight of Sick Fund benefits for clothing workers in the Western ('ape and the challenge posed to a new leadership intent on extending the boundaries of a narrow but paternalistic form of unionism.
This study was rooted in a crucial stage of the transformation of the trade- union involved from bureaucratic quiescence to democratic activism (Hyman 19X9). The origins of the Garment Workers’ Union - Western Province (GWII- WP) and its establishment as a compliant, non-militant union were described in chapter I. One of the bulwarks of the union was its benefits, and the leadership presented the Sick Fund as chief amongst these. The Sick Fund of the Cape Clothing Industry was first established in 1942, 15 years alter the formation of the union.2 It provided for partial replacement of wages lost due to illness, as well as a simple health care benefit, giving workers (but not their dependants) access to contracted general practitioners ( ‘panel doctors’) and medication and, in lime, a
2 Note that though lurmed in 1927, the union did not (unction us a union until the mid 19 tils (Nicol 19X3).
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number o f other benefits. At the time of the study, there were 96 panel doctors in 103 surgeries (some had two surgeries). In most areas there was a choice of doctors and workers were not bound to one doctor but could change at will, visiting doctors where they lived or worked. Doctors near factories tended to have particularly busy practices.
The first medical clinic was opened in 1964. A maternity benefit was introduced in 1991. These benefits were administered by the Industrial Council and funded by equal contributions from employer and worker. (See chapter I for a description of the Industrial Council system.)
The Fund represented a major advance for clothing workers, giving them access to sick pay twenty five years before it was written into the Factories Act in
1962. Once the benefit was introduced, however, its administration was removed from the arena of struggle. Though there were occasional minor improvements in benefits over the years, there was no systematic analysis of their value, especially in comparison with statutory sick leave and pay, until the late 1980s.4
The spur to re-examination of benefits was the entry of the new officials in the 1980s. Most of them came from an activist tradition, either from youth and student movements, or from experience in other, more radical unions (specifically those which had emerged in the new wave of unionism which began in the 1970s). There was a change in the top leadership, as the grip of the Petersen family was
' Regular sessions with a gynaecologist ( I95X), an ante natal clinic (1962), an optical clinic (196.3), dental clinic (197.3) (Cooper 1979).
1 'Hie problems ol (other) Sick funds had been raised, tor example in IIIRC (19X1). which arose Irom an analysis ol the I ;ixkI workers' Medical licncfit fund (I W M Itl) undertaken hy the 1111« i at the request of the food and Canning Workers' Union. As a result of this study, the f WMItl established a workers' clinic in I’aarl. fo r a description of this clinic, see laindon (199.3).
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loosened.5 When GAWU was formed in 1987, it adopted policies and principles consciously aligned to those of COSATU affiliates (non-racialism, non-sexism, democratic worker control and ‘one union, one industry’) and called for six months observer status in COSATU structures to be followed by affiliation (GAWU
1988a; 1988b). The new officials were faced with a largely passive membership, unaccustomed to participation in union affairs, anxious about radicalism and ‘politics’ (Nicol 1983; 1984a; 1984b; Bloch 1982). The membership was overwhelmingly ‘coloured’, a disenfranchised group, marginalised in national politics, whose only forum for political representation was a discredited puppet parliament (the House of Representatives), which had responsibility for a narrowly defined list of ‘own affairs’, related to people classified as ‘coloured’ and delegated to it by the white-only parliament.
At work, clothing workers in the Western Cape had long been
‘represented’ by a paternalist, highly centralised union leadership which had a close relationship with the employers, of which it was proud:
What marks our Industry, by and large, is a happy relationship between workers and management. Where else in the world would you find a Trade Union running an inter-factory Spring Queen competition with management and workers co-operating just for the fun of it?” (Clothes Line 1982, quoted in Suttner 1983, 17)
The task of organisers (full-time officials) was described in the union's own pamphlet as follows: ‘ORGANISERS: Are employed full time to deal with workers’ problems or problems relating to benefits due to workers. They visit
5 The long serving general secretary was Louis Petersen, his son Cedric was assistant general secretary, and other family members were also employed by the union (Nicol 1984a). Cedric Petersen was also editor of the weekly union newsletter ‘Clothesline’.
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factories periodically to enlighten workers on Trade Union policy and act as liaison between employers and employees in order to resolve any disputes and maintain amicable understanding.' (GWU-WP n.d., quoted in Sultner 1985, 88) Inline with this top-down approach, wage agreements were simply announced to workers. Though there was a shop steward structure on paper, shop stewards’ scope of action was limited to minor tasks related to benefit administration. They were not involved in negotiations and there had been no industry-wide industrial action since 1936 (Nicol 1984a).
The GWU-WP’s proprietorial attitude towards the benefits associated with membership was somewhat misleading, as most of the benefits were in fact jointly funded by employers and administered by the Industrial Council.1' The benefits arose from being a clothing worker, rather than from being a union member, though given the fact that there was a closed shop, the confusion is understandable and compounded by the fact that the clinic and the Industrial Council offices where sick pay was collected were in the same building as the union, Induslria |sic| House.' This confusion undoubtedly suited the ‘old’ union: during the brief period when the Clothing Workers’ Union (CUOWIJ) attempted to organise in the industry in opposition to the CiWU-WP, the old union used its newsletter to warn that workers who joined CI.OWU would lose their benefits.
'' The confusion was undoubtedly strengthened by the tact lli.il all workers were provided with a set ol lour pamphlets ol identical formal, two on the Sick fund and die Provident fund (both