Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Dr. Emmanuel Akwetey
Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
5 November 1998
I finally got some comments on the proposal done for you. I hope you will find it useful. I have commented on sections 2 and 3 although I thought of commenting critically on all the sections, which I find to be interesting. However, I am unable to do so now due to time constraints.
Change in Labour Management Relations
Industrial peace in Anglophone countries like Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa was largely secured, for most part of the period 1939-90, through despotic authoritarian regimes. Under these regimes, workers were abused and/or repressed and trade unions were excluded from economic policy making. These regimes were never founded on the basis of respect for workers and human rights. Their prolonged existence has implied the institutionalisation of a general culture of disrespect for human rights at all levels of state-civil society relations. Against that backdrop, pleas or arguments of 'humanisation' tend to fall on deaf ears of officials who operate a system that is generally unresponsive to moral and rational arguments alternative to the official point of view. This means that arguments in support of the humanisation of workers may voice moral concerns but are less likely to help unions when the management or officials repressing them are not sensitive to the message.
If the labour management regime of the period between 1945 and 1998 is detailed out critically, it would appear that "industrial peace" was predominantly secured albeit briefly through the use of a double-edged strategy of compromises. This was essentially negotiated between the state and capital on the one hand, and the state and labour on the other. But hardly was there a compromise between capital and labour. Admittedly, the state-led development strategies that required the establishment of these state-corporatist regimes are now in decline. But it does not follow from the decline that there will occur a realignment of labour market coalitions in support of rationally negotiated compromises between capital and labour.
The evidence so far, point to the fact that the new labour management regimes that were establishment to facilitate private sector-led economic growth through the effective implementation of structural adjustment programmes are splitting labour and capital rather than bringing them together. Although private sector and export-led strategies of development appear to be flourishing today, the operations of export free zones and the human resource management approach have undermined nationally based arrangements. Prospective private investors do not welcome unionisation and would prefer to see the freezing of union activities in their factories and firms, possibly for several years, as part of the attractive investment packages that governments must present to them. In Ghana, there are efforts, if not preparations, to introduce the new labour management system in the public service. As part of that preparation, the Ghana Government -the main employer- is proposing large retrenchment of civil servants that would cut the total number of employees from 75,000 to an estimated 24,000 over a two-year period (1998-2000). Furthermore, a new system of 'individualised' pay systems might soon be introduced in the sector while the supervisory and controlling powers of public sector managers are substantially increased over employees.
The indications are that the introduction and spread of the new Human Resource Management system in countries like Ghana, Zambia and Uganda has intensified in tandem with the expansion of the private sector economy and is likely to spread further in the 21st Century, at least in the early years. Organized labour's responses to the changing labour management system has varied across sectors and countries but everywhere it has been all but effective. In the private sector, especially in the export free zone area unionisation is low and workers are less protected by collective agreements. Although, the national labour federations and sector unions are exerting pressure on governments and investors to respect and enforce existing legislation on labour unionisation, they appear to have made little impact.
Governments have been more inclined to amending or reviewing major labour legislation in order to decentralise and/or restrict unionisation, hoping to attract more foreign investors. This was done in Zambia in 1993 while similar attempts in Ghana have stalled since 1996.
Trade unions' response to this threat has mainly taken the form of countervailing resistance or opposition to various proposals and strategies but the effect so far has been minimal.
Apart from resisting the amendment of labour legislation, trade unions in Ghana, for example, are seeking to raise capital through contributions and share-holding schemes in trust funds that would enable them to invest and create jobs in the economy in the long term. The extent to which that strategy would be underwritten by a new and different labour management system is very unclear. Will trade unions stick to the old national arrangement that seem no longer to hold under the impact of the liberalising pressures of economic and financial globalisation or will they simply adapt the prevailing Human Resources Management system or will they design and implement an alternative management system? While answers to these questions await research, organized labour appears to have a limited intellectual capacity to respond to the challenges of the new management systems in the mentioned Anglophone African countries. Their participation in the discourses as well as ability to propose and develop alternative ideas to improve management relations in their favour remains weak. This limited capacity is evident in the dearth of documentation and analysis of new trends in labour management and its impact on workers and unions, and the conspicuous absence of proposals on how to control the adverse effects while advancing the positive. There is a dearth of skills, knowledge and experience for responding pro-actively and effectively to the challenges and problems that are emanating from the new system. Furthermore, the new regimes are despotic and reinforcing the authoritarian labour practices that post-independence labour legislation sought, in the first place, to control.
The repressive onslaught on organized labour over the past decade or more has been so intensive that unions appear increasingly unable to respond to the challenges of the new labour management regime. The fear of losing one's job in the private sector, or being retrenched in the public sector, has evoked insecurity and caused anxieties that deeply undermine the confidence of unionised workers to initiate and sustain collective action. This general psychological weakening impedes the efforts of trade union leaders to either mobilise their members for militant action or to rely on them as a disciplined, collective force that could either back them in negotiations or obey the decisions they make regarding negotiated agreements. The problem gets more complicated as the human resource management strategies side-step existing labour institutions and deal with workers directly, enticing many with lucrative pay and keeping them apart from the unions. This undermines the basis for representation of the collective interest of workers in economic policy making. Problems of legitimacy, effective and democratic participation in decision-making, effective exercise of authority and peaceful resolution of conflicts continue to grow, spawning a pervading culture of indiscipline and violence at work places and in the wider society. These management problems suggest that the future of 'industrial peace' in many of the Anglophone African countries is rather uncertain. Both the old strategy of compromise between state and capital or state and labour are under stress. The alternative capital-labour compromise arrangement has not or is yet to prove that it is a better guarantor of industrial peace. So far, its despotic character has done more harm than good to the compromise that ought to be effectively negotiated between capital and labour in order to improve productivity, spur economic growth and address welfare issues. Research must focus not only on the critical assessment of impacts of, and responses to prevailing management systems but must also address how to democratise labour management regimes so that capital-labour relations can be systematically improved in the long term.
Public Status of Trade Unions
Paradoxically, organized labour's public stature appeared to have been boosted through resistance to Structural Adjustment programmes (SAP) and authoritarian regimes but then subsequently suffered decline when transitions to democracy occurred. The Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) systematically built its stature as the leading countervailing force in civil society through its conflict with the Kaunda government and the one-party. In Ghana, an identical trend occurred. The TUC- Trades Union Congress, regained its stature as a coherent and legitimate representative organization of unionised workers when it effectively displaced government controlled Workers Defence Committees (WDCs) from workplaces and focused campaigns and protests against unfavourable aspects of SAPs and the arbitrary and exclusionary decision-making system that it reinforced. By standing up to authoritarian regimes and questioning the basis and contents of their economic policy choices, organized labour gave voice to the concerns of many suppressed civil society actors who had no legal and politically independent platforms on which to air their critical views freely on public affairs. However, while it took confrontation and opposition for organized labour to speak occasionally for the whole of society, its status as the representative of workers was conferred by governments as part of the state-corporatist arrangements that symbolised the compromise between state and labour in the postcolonial era. In several countries this status was conferred through the major labour legislation that governments now seek to amend in order to facilitate the implementation of human resource management strategies.
Such amendments have not always been inspired by the market development strategies of today. In Zambia where the Industrial Relations Act of 1973 was eventually amended in 1993, the Chiluba Government, like its predecessor UNIP Government, felt that the ZCTU had become too B an organization that threatened the power of the ruling political party. Apart from this political reason, the amendment has also been justified on the grounds of liberal democratic values such as freedom of association (ILO Convention No 87 on right of association). In Zambia, the experienced trade unionist President Chiluba, together with the team of ex-trade unionists he recruited into the government, was able to effectively draw on each of these reasons to oversee the clipping of the wings of the ZCTU in the post-Kaunda era (1991-). Thus, the once powerful ZCTU has since 1993 lost more than half of its members largely as a result of privatisation and labour retrenchment policies of the government. But the major source of weakness was rooted in an internal power struggle that resulted from the ambivalence of the ZCTU to consistently play the role of independent critic of national economic policies as it did in Kaunda's time. Because of its political alliance with the MMD, it failed initially to criticise the structural adjustment policies that were swiftly implemented in 1992-94. Rank and file members who suffered the brunt of these austerity measures including the withdrawal of subsidies on food etc. were more disappointed that their leaders could not articulate their interests clearly and represent them fully in public. Simmering discontent eventually exploded into the internal power struggle that split the organization in 1994. Since then the ZCTU has declined to the level of political obscurity and become a shadow of itself. Its public status today is lower than it was in Kaunda's authoritarian one-party state.
Ghana's experience depicts another circumstance in which the public status of organized labour was salvaged through a public declaration of party political neutrality. Unlike the ZCTU, the Ghana TUC refrained from entering into formal alliance or negotiating a formal political pact with any of the political parties that contested the 1992 general elections- presidential and parliamentary. For, its past relations with parties had not been a particularly happy experience. Nkrumah and the CPP set out to dominate and completely control the TUC. It took the military coup of February 24th, 1966, for the trade unions to regain their freedom. Then later in 1972, as it asserted its right to criticise government economic policies publicly, and to participate in high-level economic decision-making, the TUC provoked the Progress Party Government into proscribing it. It took another coup to retrieve its legal status. This experience of nearly losing its organizational autonomy in relation to political parties informed the decision, albeit partially, to stay out of political party alliances. It can be conjectured that the TUC had saved itself from the fate that the ZCTU suffered after the transition to formal political democracy. Its public status as a party political neutral actor has expanded its scope of political action in public domain, where it has retained its organizational coherence, succeeded in blocking a rushed amendment of the 1965 Industrial Relations Act, and articulates critical and independent views on national economic and social policies.
However, unlike the period preceding the transition to democracy, the voice of the TUC and the ZCTU are perceived as voices for workers rather than the entire community of civil society actors. This is because in the much pluralised setting of the two countries, trade unions are just one out of several civil society actors operating within relatively open and free political systems.
Political parties, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), individual opinion leaders and many other actors are out there articulating specific and general issues in a manner that trade unions are sometimes incapable of doing. Policy advocacy is one such area. Within this plural setting, issues of workers representation are actively pursued within the industrial relations institutions such as the Tripartite Committees and the national labour Advisory Councils. Perhaps, it is in the labour market sphere that the TUC's strength and public status appears to be evidently B. Internal democracy and education programmes have been systematically implemented since 1983. And compared to the period 1975-82, it would appear that these programmes have contributed to the Ber internal coherence of the TUC and enhanced its attraction to other civil society actors who it appears to be closely networking with. The TUC in Ghana has B ties with the Ghana Bar Association and the Ghana Journalists Association.
Lately, journalists have been considering joining the TUC so as to qualify or secure collective bargaining certificates. The TUC also plays an important role in the civil society led Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) that is currently under implementation in Ghana. In deed the TUC holds the Chair of the Civil Society Coordinating Council (CIVISOC)- a representative organ of civil society organizations including NGOs set up specifically to oversee the SAPRI exercise. Furthermore, the TUC works closely with specific civil society actors who provide it intellectual services. The Department of Economics, University of Ghana, Legon, and the Integrated Social evelopment Centre (ISODEC), a non-member based NGO, Accra, are two organizations that perform consultancy services for the TUC.
Within the current liberal democratic constitutional framework, organized labour is more likely to gain greater public recognition as a representative organization of workers. However, such recognition also carries with it the sectarian labelling which neo-liberal market forces used effectively to undermine the public position of the trade unions in the 1980s. Trade unions have been portrayed as relatively privileged, urban dwellers who exploit the rural population to subsidise their urban lifestyles. Although this point has been effectively rebutted on the basis of credible research findings, public perception that trade unions are selfish, too narrowly focused on the well being of their members and neglectful of the welfare- social and economic rights- of the wider community persists. Above all, workers are still dismissed as intellectual lightweights who may not be able to contribute much to policy debates. These negative views dim the public status of union. Clearly there is a need for systematic research on these questions because they are pertinent to the wider issues of the role of trade unions in strengthening democratic governance practices and consolidating democracy in the long term.
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