Organise or Die? by Raphaël Botiveau

Author:Raphaël Botiveau [Botiveau, Raphaël]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, General, Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations
ISBN: 9781776142064
Google: ijZjDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-12-01T00:35:57+00:00

CHAPTER

7

The Learning Organisation

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT VS WORKER CONTROL

NUM is and has always been conceived as a school. Referring to ‘pastoral power’, in the footsteps of Michel Foucault, as one type of leadership that is ‘formative’ and ‘redemptive’ because it seeks to involve those it leads through a display of empathy and selflessness, Moodie explained:

Marcel Golding, who joined Cyril Ramaphosa as deputy general secretary, talked about how important it was for the union to deliver in redemptive terms as well as in practical terms. The union led by producing new ‘selves’ (in Foucault’s terms), forming trade unionists. This involved intense educational work on the meaning of unionism and productive leadership with tactical skills. It was crucially important to listen to what the workers themselves had to say. Golding told me: ‘Never, ever, just take the liberty of deciding for them. They must decide what to do on their own and I think that was one of the good things we learned. That mine-workers were not fools. They knew what they wanted despite [low] levels of education.’1

Eddie Majadibodu, head of the union’s production pillar, expressed this very well when I asked him what he thought of the trajectory of renowned past NUM leaders:

First of all and I am proud about NUM is that it has become the school of [the] working class but also the school of prosperity. Because these people you are talking about all come from NUM. Now one of the key decisions of NUM was leadership development, was to build leadership. Somewhere in 1986, 1987, 1988, NUM sent a number of people to Cuba to study as engineers because they did not have those opportunities here … And they came back and some of them are in the mines. But on the other side we also built people politically … In NUM we have got a particular way of nurturing the talent in leadership skills and I think so far we have done very well.2

This view of the union as a school was also put to me by former general secretary Frans Baleni:

NUM can develop a person; when I joined NUM I had no matric but through the exposure in the union, I completed matric through correspondence; I went to university through correspondence; I have got a degree today through NUM … I did Social Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. I have done lots of international training programmes and so on … So the union gives you full training and also it gives exposure, you know you are tested; I’ve been given things that I had never done and we’ve been told: that’s your job do it … and you start from scratch and you end up knowing how to do these things. So I have been an organiser, I have been a health and safety person, I have been an educator, I have been a chief negotiator and I’m still doing that. I have been marketing the union, so that’s a good training background. You also obviously get exposed and people can get attracted to you, be it politics, be it boards [of directors].

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