Trade unions in South Africa and the discourse of the neoliberal state

The young South African democracy has been a target for the migration of two different global discourses: one that represents the Washington Consensus, a term coined in the late 1980s to identify the policies that Washington-based institutions (such as the IMF and the World Bank) suggested to the developing countries (Williamson 1990:7), and the other which represents the Beijing Consensus (Ramo, 2004:3-4), normally associated with the idea of the developmental state. The Washington Consensus is the name given to a trend in the management of the economy and societies that gained momentum in the 1980s. Such a trend is associated with the hegemony, both in academia and in policy-related debates, of the economic doctrine of neoliberalism, which is, in turn, characterised by a strong emphasis on individual freedom (Harvey 2005: 7), the capability of markets to self-regulate, and, most importantly for the scope of this study, in the mistrust of the intervention of the state in the economy and the need for fiscal discipline (Williamson, 1990: 8). In the South African context, such discourse is frequently placed in contrast to the developmental discourse: the discourse coming from the successful developmental states of East Asia and, arguably, the People’s Republic of China. The developmental discourse, associated with the Beijing Consensus, has its focus on a new interpretation of the market-versus-state dichotomy. The promoters of the Beijing Consensus, indeed, look at the state as the fundamental economic agent. The state is not only the manager but also the architect of the economic development of the country. This theory has had wide success in developing countries, not only for its content but also because it is seen as a product of the “Global South” (Dirlik, 2007: 7). The public service is, consequently, one of the arenas in which these two competing discourses may find a high level of disparity and in which their respective successes in colonisation might be assessed. This is especially true in the moments of overt confrontation between the government, in its role as employer, and the public sector workers, who are the ones on which the reforms in one sense or another are going to impact more immediately. I take such instances to be the ones in which the state employees decide to down their tools. In democratic South Africa, civil servants have gone on strike four times - in years 1999 (Barchiesi, 1999: 15), 2004 (The Star, 2004), 2007 (Buhlungu, Brookes, & Wood, 2008: 447) and 2010 (Ceruti, 2011: 151). Such confrontations also have a political aspect to them, which is peculiar to the South African context. Indeed, the relationship of the former liberation movement and now majority party, the African National Congress (ANC), with the most important trade union confederation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), dates back to the struggle against the apartheid regime, especially from the 1980s on. This collaboration has been transformed, in democratic South Africa, into a government alliance, the Tripartite Alliance, to which the South African Communist Party (SACP) is also a partner. Thus, when COSATU-affiliated unions in the public sector go on strike, they are perceived to also be striking against their ally, the ANC.