Miners’ Leader Sees Strike as Test of Strength in Anti-Apartheid Battle

With half of South Africa’s black miners on strike, sharply cutting the economically vital production of gold and coal, Cyril Ramaphosa has emerged as the country’s strongest labor leader and a political heavyweight as well.

Ramaphosa, 34, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, has been preparing for five years for the present showdown with South Africa’s wealthy mining companies, knowing that it would be a test of strength for the entire black labor movement as well as for the broader fight against apartheid.

“This is the big one,” Ramaphosa said as more than 300,000 miners began the strike nearly two weeks ago. “If we win this strike, it is going to be a significant motivation for all other workers to continue with their own struggle for a living wage. If we lose, it will have a devastating effect.”

Ramaphosa also acknowledged that the strike, the largest wage dispute in South African history, is “about a lot more than wages” and that if the union wins, the victory will have major political implications.

Sees Government Fear

“To the government, we represent a constituency that is part and parcel of the liberation movement in this country,” he said. “There is a lot of fear and trepidation in government, I think, about the outcome.”

A substantial union victory, confirming the mine workers’ fast-growing strength in the country’s most important industry, would encourage other black labor unions and their allies in the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups, which has been hit hard in the last year by the government’s state of emergency.

“With so many groups forced almost underground by the state of emergency, unions increasingly are taking the lead in the (anti-apartheid) struggle,” a United Democratic Front official said the other day. “With so many of our leaders detained, trade union men like Cyril Ramaphosa are moving to the fore.”

For Ramaphosa, however, politics and economics have long been fused.

“We have recognized that working class issues are political issues,” he told the first convention of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a federation he helped found in 1985. “We have to make a link between economic issues and political issues. The struggle on the shop floor cannot be separate from the wider political issues. As unions, we have a solemn duty to develop consciousness among workers of their exploitation as workers. . . .

Leading Role for Workers

“Workers must play a leading role in the struggle, in wider political events. Politics is not about changing governments. It is about eliminating poverty and unemployment. The wealth must be shared by all the people in the country. It is important for us to make our politics the politics of the oppressed people of this country.”

Ramaphosa, a lawyer, came to the labor movement from politics, and he belongs to the increasingly influential group of young black leaders, most of them now in their mid-30s, who were first drawn into “the struggle” by the late black consciousness leader Steve Biko.

Biko, who died in police custody in 1977 at age 31, had infused many young blacks with a new pride in themselves. By founding the South African Students Organization and Black People’s Convention, he had encouraged them to unite for the first time in more than a decade to fight apartheid and throw off their “shackles of servitude.”

In the 1970s, Ramaphosa was a branch chairman of the South African Students Organization and an active member of the Black People’s Convention, both of which were outlawed later by the government. He was detained under the country’s security laws twice without charge, once for 11 months and later for six months, because of his political activities.

Given Organizing Task

When Ramaphosa finished his studies, in 1981, he joined the Council of Unions of South Africa as a legal adviser, and he was soon given the task of organizing the country’s 600,000 black miners, less than 1% of whom belonged to any union at the time.

The only previous black mining union of any size, the African Mine Workers Union, was crushed in 1946, when 70,000 miners went on strike for higher wages but were forced back to work at bayonet point. Police had similarly broken a strike by 71,000 black miners in 1920.

Ramaphosa went from mine to mine, attempting to mobilize miners from half a dozen ethnic groups with varying political outlooks. Although often harassed by mine managers, he gradually built up the mine workers’ membership--the union now has more than 320,000 members--and then won recognition for the union from the Chamber of Mines, which includes South Africa’s six major mining companies.

“Ramaphosa became the Lech Walesa of black labor in this country,” Andrew Levy, a prominent labor consultant, said, comparing Ramaphosa’s charisma and organizing ability with that of the leader of Poland’s now outlawed Solidarity trade union.

Political Views Changed

Company negotiators describe him as “sophisticated,” “impressive,” “hard-working” and “very, very able,” although they do not like to say so too often or too publicly. They are annoyed, however, by what they see as his commitment to socialism, including nationalization of the country’s mines, and by his calls overseas for the withdrawal of foreign companies from South Africa.

Over the years, Ramaphosa’s political views have shifted. Like many of his generation, he has moved from the “ourselves alone” racial exclusivity of black consciousness. In the process of doing so, he took the mine workers out of the all-black Council of Unions of South Africa to establish the non-racial Congress of South African Trade Unions.

Ramaphosa, as leader of the country’s largest black union, has also been instrumental in forging an alliance between the union federation and the United Democratic Front and in winning formal acceptance by them of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which is the basic manifesto of the outlawed African National Congress.

A bearded man with a gentle manner, he has become known for what one associate described as his “total determination and total dedication” to achieving the goals he has set himself. Cool and articulate, he is carefully listened to by other black leaders.

Led Successive Strikes

In 1984, Ramaphosa led the mine workers on their first legal strike--a brief, confused and bloody affair in which at least 10 miners died. There was a second strike in 1985, again over wages, and an abortive work stoppage last year.

Each was an attempt to develop the union’s bargaining strength with the giant mining companies, to expand its membership and increasingly to alter the balance of power in the mining industry.

The current strike, seeking a 30% pay increase, revolves around the same issue, but it was planned to avoid the mistakes made in earlier years and to force the mining companies to negotiate a wage agreement rather than simply announce what they will give the workers.

“They still do not take us seriously,” Ramaphosa said at the outset of the strike. “They have been patronizing--more than that, arrogant, actually. . . . But they will pay for their arrogance.”

He had predicted that 200,000 of the union’s members would go on strike at 56 targeted gold mines and collieries and that perhaps 100,000 other miners would join. The union later claimed that more than 340,000 miners were on strike, though the Chamber of Mines put the figure at a maximum of 230,000 and said it was decreasing.

‘Strike Is Still Solid’

“We have a major crisis every day, often two and sometimes three,” Ramaphosa said as the second week of the strike drew to a close, “but the strike is still solid.”

He said that management had doubted that the union could organize so many workers across such a large area and then keep up their morale through a strike of more than a week.

“We have mobilized and politicized a group of workers who nobody thought could be organized,” he said.

Although negotiations have not been resumed, there have been management offers to talk about non-wage issues, including danger pay, death benefits and health and welfare funds. Ramaphosa led an angry union walkout of talks with one company on reducing strike violence after a report that the police had fired tear-gas grenades and rubber bullets at miners this week.

“We are prepared for a long, long strike,” he said in the bustling strike headquarters the union has set up in a downtown office building, which ironically is managed by a subsidiary of the union’s major strike target, Anglo American Corp.

Goal Is Sweeping Changes

Ramaphosa’s long-term goals include not only higher wages but sweeping changes through the whole mining industry. An immediate goal is ending the migrant labor system, which forces miners to live in fenced, guarded hostels without their families for most of the year.

“We want to get rid of this system,” he said. “It is inhuman to expect anyone to live without his family for 11 months of the year. Our members are not asking for mansions, just a place they can live with their wives and families.”

Another early goal will be “to take control of the industry by setting the pace of how work should be organized,” he said, and added:

“We are not suggesting that the mines must slow down, but their practices will have to change. Our members are working under slave conditions where they are not allowed to exercise their brain power, their skill or their experience.”