Why Mandela Is Singling Out U.S. Labor

When organizers from the Service Employees International Union wanted to stir the emotions during a recent rally for striking Century City janitors, they devised a chant modeled after one they had learned from South African janitors.

Their teachers included Florence Devillers, general secretary of the 70,000-member South African Domestic Workers Union, who had passed through Los Angeles a few days before while on a U.S. tour sponsored by the service union.

That meeting was one of countless exchange programs that have taken place between American and black South African unions in the last two decades, and it helps explain why organized labor, despite its weak political standing in the United States, is a fixture in Nelson Mandela’s U.S. tour.

After he meets with President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III today, Mandela will attend an evening meeting with the AFL-CIO’s executive council, made up of the nation’s three dozen most influential union presidents and other labor leaders.

The AFL-CIO prides itself on having been on record against apartheid since 1956 and for having solidly endorsed economic sanctions against the South African government.

In recent years, gestures have ranged from hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to anti-apartheid groups to a protest by unionized workers at a homeless shelter in New York. The union workers refused to serve canned pineapple from South Africa.

On Thursday Mandela will pay homage to two large unions that have been instrumental in providing financial and educational support to their South African counterparts.

He will speak that morning in Miami to 6,000 delegates attending an international convention of the 1.2-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which has supported product boycotts, pension fund divestment campaigns and demonstrations for sanctions. The group’s secretary-treasurer, William Lucy, a member of the committee coordinating Mandela’s U.S. visit, traveled to Namibia to meet with Mandela in March, a few weeks after Mandela was freed after serving 27 years in prison.

Thursday afternoon, before a rally at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, Mandela will visit Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich., where the United Auto Workers fought some of its earliest and bloodiest organizing battles in the 1930s.

According to organizers of Mandela’s tour, the stops were planned after Mandela insisted on finding a way to say “thank you” to labor.

While labor has long fought against apartheid, its relationship with Mandela has been more complicated.

Because Mandela’s African National Congress is an avowedly revolutionary movement with unabashed ties to some communist regimes, the AFL-CIO has never hailed Mandela with the same passion it showed for Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

Some of South Africa’s black trade unions are affiliated with the World Federation of Trade Unions, a Soviet satellite operation established to compete with the U.S.-backed International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. That affiliation clashed with the traditionally conservative foreign policy preferences of American labor leaders.

The AFL-CIO shipped millions of dollars worth of assistance to Solidarity during the 1980s and financed a tumultuous American tour last winter for Walesa.

The assistance to black South African unions has been less direct but equally staunch.

The UAW, for example, began withdrawing its funds from banks with loans to South Africa in 1978. It negotiated agreements with the Big Three auto makers to challenge pension fund investment decisions. It established training programs for South African union organizers and began sending union executives there on trips more than a decade ago. Its international president, Owen Bieber, was among those arrested at the South African Embassy during anti-apartheid demonstrations in the mid-1980s.