In the first three COSATU Workers’ Surveys (1994, 1998 and 2004), support for the ANC among the federation’s members was very strong (averaging at 74 per cent). However, in 2008 this trend was reversed as support for the ruling part dipped to 57 per cent. This obviously raises questions about the hegemonic power of the political current. Phrased differently, support for the ANC has waned significantly, membership of the SACP has remained small but stable, but trust in COSATU and its leadership has remained high.
The ‘waning’ of the support is ambiguous: support for the Alliance and its endurance is at 63 per cent. Here, there is no doubt, respondents have answered with a strong ‘yes’ to questions of political preferences and affiliations. The ambiguity arises because the majority of those who did not say ‘yes’ were not forthcoming: they refused to answer the question. The increase of this category is significant, but needs more nuanced qualitative work if a more meaningful answer is to be provided.
Then follows the ambiguity of what it means to ‘belong’ to the ANC. For socialist critics of the ANC and of COSATU, it would have been assumed to be obvious that the more middle-class an organisation becomes, the more it would support middle-class and petit-bourgeois movements. It would have been easy to match that with an image of the ANC as a pro-capitalist movement, content with a narrow Bee focus, whose main preoccupation is the transformation of a black petit-bourgeoisie into a wealthy bourgeois class. The shift in COSATU’s base away from the unskilled and semi-skilled workers would have therefore entailed an increased support for the ANC. In fact, the 2008 survey shows the opposite: the younger, the more educated and
the more skilled respondents showed less support for the ANC (and/or they fell into the ‘refuse to tell’ category); while the blue-collar, the unskilled and the semi-skilled respondents, and those who were migrant and male, showed more support for the ANC (and the number of respondents with this status in the ‘refuse to tell’ category decreased).
As shown in other parts of this chapter, the 58 per cent support for the ANC correlates highly with more poorly educated workers (Standards 2–5, or grades 4–6, and lower qualifications). Support is at its highest in the oldest group of workers and shop stewards (56–65 year-olds) who would have been 19–28 year-olds during the Durban strikes of 1973, at the time when the contemporary trade unions were formed, and in their prime of their 30s and early 40s during the struggles of the 1980s. The greatest and most unambiguous support will be found among miners and construction and allied workers, that is, the highest support will be in the National Union of Mineworkers and, by implication, also among migrant workers and those who have the most household dependants. This can also be traced in other industrial unions that had their heydays of militancy in the 1980s and early 1990s.
For a careful analysis of what has been happening in local politics in the poorer sections of the urban and rural areas in the last decade, this is not surprising. As many new social movements have been discovering, a high degree of ANC grassroots power, especially during and since the ‘Zuma tsunami’ , has taken hold of local mobilisations.
‘Of shifts in consciousness?’
In 2000, during a study of black worker leadership, which involved a longitudinal ethnography for over a 30-year period, it was possible to argue that the ‘elastic band’ that held their comradeships together survived into the 2000s, despite mobility and differentiation (Sitas 2006). However it was stretched, this ‘elastic band’ held people who had experienced rapid mobility after the 1994 period, people who remained ‘stuck’ in their old jobs and people whose life-chances had deteriorated through job losses and unemployment. Those ‘stuck’ , who remained on the shopfloor and who were involved in defensive struggles over job losses, were suspicious of the new generation of workers. The reality of a changing guard and of younger shop stewards ‘coming in’ who did not share their histories and traditions was palpable. I argued then
that any future dissonance, alterity or resistance on the shopfloor by workers will have to understand a ‘negotiation’ between the two generations. Does the COSATU Workers’ Survey, a few years on, indicate such a ‘negotiation’ – or a changing of the guard? Unfortunately, the answer remains a research question: a more decisive attempt at an answer, on the basis of the survey, will demand a recoding of the questionnaires and different questions. From what exists in the age-correlations, there seems to be – at first glance – a definite changing of the guard, at least at the level of political dispositions. At first glance, too, there seems to be more coherence and continuity across age-cohorts within the industrial unions and less so within the service and public sector unions.