The Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO) is based in Germiston in South Africa. Operating since 2011, the CWAO offers legal and organising support to workers, most notably for precarious workers fighting for permanent contracts. The CWAO works alongside the Simunye Workers Forum, a worker-led organisation committed to building unity against ‘any and all bosses’. In the context of an on-going strike by members of the Forum, we spoke to organisers at the CWAO about the history, politics and activity of the project.

Could you outline the current dispute that the CWAO is supporting?

The CWAO has been supporting an ongoing strike at a relatively big sweet manufacturer, Mister Sweet. This sweet company itself is owned by one of the two big food producers in the country, as South Africa has a highly monopolised economy, with each sector dominated by a few major companies. Part of the struggle has been to draw this parent company out of the shadow.

The CWAO organises with a lot of workers in the food processing sector, particularly women and agency workers. In one way, this dispute really highlights many of the new kinds of divisions which neoliberalism has thrown up in South African society, with the use of precarious labour being central to the employers, and it’s characteristic of the kind of practical and strategic questions we have to address. However, in other ways it’s quite unique. We’ve been organising the agency workers at this company for maybe five years, and as is quite rare, there is now a majority of permanent workers at this workplace - perhaps 300 permanent and 200 agency workers. It took a long time to get these agency workers permanent. One dynamic that remains, but we are working against, is a tension between older permanent workers and the new ones. We’ve been organising and trying to build greater unity between them, strengthening relations between them through shared battles; wildcat strikes during COVID when the company wasn’t supplying PPE, for example. There were maybe two or three wildcat strikes over a few years. These strikes built unity amongst the workers, and they’ve now come out as a united block to demand a living wage, of 19,500 Rand. This is quite a significant figure for food processing workers, with many of the workers being on more like 6000 Rand.

Of course, the company keeps using agency workers and pushing the divisions between these workers. What is most unique, though, is that this is the second strike in about eight months in which the workers have made the tactical decision to request that the agency workers continue to work. They cannot declare a shared dispute as they have technically different employers, and so the law prevents them from coming out alongside each other in solidarity. Normally, the agency workers would have been considered as scabbing, but the workers have decided that they can apply power in this way. Usually these agency workers would primarily be working in packaging, rather than production, but now the company is having them working in production. Just today, we got a text saying four of these workers have been injured operating the machines. So, the workers are trying out different forms of developing solidarity and organising against the company.

How is the centre supporting the workers?

The CWAO is divided into the Advice Officer itself, which has full-time employees, and then the Simunye Workers Forum which exists in parallel. The Advice Office is somewhat different to traditional advice centres, in that it really focuses just on labour struggles. This has been true since 2015, when new legislation was introduced. The new legislation was a bit of a sham, one to appease a horrifically sweetheart labour movement, but it allowed us to mobilise workers around this specific bit of legislation. It emerged after the Marikana massacre in 2012, after which the situation around agency workers changed. The law now stipulated that contracted agency workers had to be made permanent after three months, if they were doing the same job as a permanent worker and in the same conditions. This new law really gave a boost to the worker centre, which had existed before but was not able to grow significantly. The centre has focused on building a collective dynamic around this new law.

Our organisers at the CWAO have been there supporting the strike as organisers, and have been doing so over the last four years. They would have been advising workers about how to declare disputes around wages, helping to clarify demands and navigate the stringent legislation. Then we’ve, of course, been out there on the picket line every single day, giving out soup and support to the striking workers. We also just won a legal battle against the company which had been trying to undermine and interdict the strike by saying it had been violent, but we were able to show that to be totally untrue.¹

We’ve been trying to build networks of solidarity with workers in related companies, in the supply companies that deliver to the manufacturer. It’s not easy, of course. Large sections of the community are critical of the strike, seeing it as a privilege that these workers even have jobs in the first place. Decades ago in the 1980s, we would have quickly organised a boycott of the manufacturer and put pressure on them this way - but, now, that’s far harder. There’s a schism between the employed workers and parts of the wider community, so getting others to take action isn’t easy. We try to get support for the workers even if it’s limited, getting donations of a few bags of maize meal out to the workers and their families, for example. We also support the workers and their strike fund. This fund is completely in the workers’ control and they choose how to spend it, but we offer infrastructure to support it.

How did the CWAO get set up?

So, it’s important to note that the CWAO was not set up thinking that it would be the new form of worker organisation in South Africa. We didn’t exclude the possibility, but that was not our aim. Rather, it was tied to the history of those involved and the experiences they have had over the decades. On the one hand, there was an assessment of the traditional labour movement and its limitations. There was a distinct class character of the old labour movement, serving a particular class interest. This was true across the world. On the other hand, there is the transformation of the working class under neoliberal capitalism, and that necessitated something new - but, we were clear that this new form had to be discovered in the course of struggle itself. Above all, it was a question of reconnecting with the workers. The obvious way to do this was the form of an advice office; we weren’t just trying to ape the advice offices of the 1970s and 1980s, through which so much of the labour movement had once emerged.

The CWAO remains an experiment. Even 14 years later, we still keep an open mind to what new forms might emerge; it’s too soon in the historical process to categorically say what works and what doesn’t. When we are approached, we do not always advocate that people should simply go and open up worker centres and advice offices. Rather, we stress that the model most useful to emulate is that of the Simunye Workers’ Forum.

The genesis of the Advice Office was in trying to find out what kind of issues were confronting workers, and what their main demands were. This very much remains the case. This did not mean that we had to go out and conduct major inquiries and investigations, however. When the new law was introduced in 2015, workers started flooding into the centre. The workers we engage with, perhaps distinctly from worker centres in the US and Canada, are not primarily migrant labourers working in auxiliary roles, in cleaning or as service workers. We are rooted amongst those workers at the point of production, where there is a mass concentration of industrial workers. These workers’ primary demand is permanent employment, and to be treated equitably with other permanent workers. This bit of legislation was, therefore, for us, quite lucky. It built these two demands within the working class, and we could connect with them. Our role has therefore been less so in inquiry or getting amongst the workers, as we are very much in the industrial heartland of the country and there is a large pool of workers to draw on. Of course, consciousness raising, political education, and these things have been very important, though, alongside the legal work. There is always a struggle around ensuring the minimum wage is being paid, or campaigns to secure other rights and protections, but the permanent worker status fight has been primary.

How does the CWAO’s work relate to the traditional, mainstream trade union movement?

To understand our relation to the wider trade union movement, we have to understand how the trade union movement itself has transformed since the 1990s. Ultimately, through changes in legislation and union politics, the incentive and commitment to organising workers has been taken away. Really, since 1995, when the Labour Relations Act was put together. We critiqued this legislation at the time, for being highly compromising with the neoliberal turn, it’s not something we are only just arguing against.

The worker composition of these unions has dramatically altered, too. They are now largely public sector workers who make up the active, dominant membership of the unions, and are quite middle class. The blue-collar basis for unions, particularly COSATU,² has really declined and even when these workers are still present, there is a tendency to focus on organising with the supervisor and managerial types. It’s these types of workers who have come to dominate politically. The militant, working class foundation of these unions has now disappeared, and the politics has become one of apologism for the capitalist order; they have become sweetheart organisations for the capitalist system, in short. These unions are often hostile to the workers they organise with, for example, and are like stalking horses for the bosses who want to undercut worker activity. Most of the Left keeps totally quiet on this reality, and does not contest it. Left political parties have to keep friendly with these unions, as they are the main way they can keep in touch with parts of the working class.

We cannot approach the unions in a totally doctrinaire way though. On a day-to-day level, we have to work alongside and engage workers who are members of these unions. We strive for unity with and amongst the workers, and sometimes, we have to go via these union bureaucrats. But we have no illusions, and have never held back on our criticisms, even if we are forced to engage with them.

What is the political horizon for those engaged in the project?

For some of us involved, we are clearly committed to revolutionary politics. Our perspective is that through the centre, we are able to support the building of a new class movement, as it’s a popular point of engagement with workers and through which a socialist vision can slowly build. But we are at a point of great weakness in the movement, where there is no point bashing workers over the head with socialism and our politics. We take and meet workers where they are at their point of entry into the struggle, understanding their immediate demands and engaging the struggle with them.

It is hard to sense that there is a massive new movement coming through, or new forces coming into play that have a revolutionary politics and that are getting immersed in worker organising, or willing to learn the patience and skills that this requires. There are still many bad habits of the old left circling around us; leaving the working class to fend for itself when it does not align with your politics and will not accept your leadership as a vanguard. When the workers do rise up, you try to parachute in and provide the line. These kinds of political projects have made little attempt to understand how the working class has been restructured and recomposed, and the kind of social, political and economic issues confronting workers at the moment.

The kind of precarious, inconsistent work which characterises so much of the working class today means there is little possibility for consistent involvement in community life, or social life beyond work in general. Workers cannot always have time for getting deeply involved in political organisations, and so there is such discontinuous interaction between political organisations which are meant to provide continuity! - and the everyday reality of work and life on the factory floor. The left and trade union movement cannot grasp this, and as a result, have become totally irrelevant to much of the working class.

How do workers hear about or get drawn into activity with the centre?

Typically, workers would hear about the organisation in a number of ways. We are in an age where mass word of mouth is possible, and it’s great when that happens. In an industrial area, for example, one worker might tell another to go and see this organisation for help with your issues at work. We have got such a degree of recognition, that workers often don’t say ‘visit the CWAO’ they say ‘go to Germiston!’, the area of the city we are based. This is great, and reflects years and years of hard graft. Building on a historic tradition, we’ve also promoted the centre through practices like mass flyering of workers moving through transport hubs in the area.

We will then run periodic campaigns, recruitment campaigns, or campaigns around specific issues we have identified in certain industrial areas. We will then spend time there, giving out pamphlets and getting into conversations. We have a mobile office which we move around to different sites, where workers can go and speak to organisers on their lunch breaks or when they knock off work.

When workers get in touch, we channel them toward the Workers Forum, rather than just trying to engage them purely on legal issues. Workers can attend the Forum, which meets once a month, and we encourage as many workers to participate as possible. We do not think just having individual representatives coming to present on behalf of co-workers is the best model, so try and get as many participating as possible. We try to rotate responsibilities, who chairs meetings and takes minutes, those kinds of responsibilities, so that workers can build their skills and feel more committed to the project.

When we have these recruitment campaigns, we will call for volunteers from amongst these members, and we put them through a bit of training on basic worker rights. So when they go out and pamphlet here, there’s the process of engagement they can go through. It’s not just handing out newspapers, but something more substantial which helps clarify issues and rights to the workers themselves. We have, for example, had a project outside the industrial tribunal this year; workers will get together with a loud hailer and a gazebo, and call on or approach workers going to the tribunal to tell them about their rights and give them advice.

If these workers we engage start to get more involved long-term and participate in the Forum consistently, that’s great. But we cannot always worry about that, and we make no conditions at all that workers have to sign up or get involved to receive support or advice. Unlike a lot of unions, we don’t need them to sign on the dotted line to get our support and assistance. We definitely see our approach as a break from the more traditional ways of organising.

One thing we have to navigate is that in this time of organisational and political weakness, there is a lot of suspicion and fear amongst the workers. This is why we have our mobile centre not just there for a day or two, but camped out for like a month. We don’t just sweep through, but get based there and show our commitment to the area and its workers. We stress that workers can come back to us time and again, and we won’t disappear. There is a lot of fear amongst workers that they will lose their jobs, so we try to have regular, daily contact with these workers to show how we can support them.

The CWAO has ultimately succeeded through having very open doors, with the whole community aware of what was happening there, and they could contribute, attend meetings, and explain themselves. The centre involved workers from a whole range of companies and industries, so all of the community was able to get involved. The centre also ensured that the meetings were always accessible; child care was available, and there was food for everyone. This ensured that the centre became a common point of reference for the whole community, and people could depend on it. It’s a well-recognised place amongst the workers.

How does the centre navigate any possible repression?

Well, the balance of class forces here is such that bosses do not really even have to rely on any explicit state repression. With the emergence of precarious labour regimes, employers have all manner of techniques to control and pressure workers. If a labour agency is supplying a worker, and some of these workers are being difficult for them, they can just tell the agency not to schedule them any longer, or shift them elsewhere to a different site. If there is an industrial tribunal, for example, a worker or a list of workers have to be named in the dispute. It’s fairly certain that these workers will just never be given more work and be dismissed. Listing these workers is a legal requirement, so the employer can simply draw on that list without needing to call more on the state.

That’s not to say, of course, that outright violence is not always a threat. When we’ve had strikes recently, we’ve had the police arrive and loudly talk about just opening fire on the workers on the picket line. Obviously, that’s partly a psychological threat, but Marikana is always a brutal reminder of what they are capable of.

We also see the growing threat of crime syndicates, who practise extortion on many parts of the community, having workers and their organisations pay protection money. This is an everyday part of workers’ lives who live inside the township, and so it is something that is inescapable when trying to organise alongside them. These kinds of syndicates are also seeping into the factory, albeit not as a massive tendency, so they are having an influence within the workplace as well. Of course, the bosses are, therefore, starting to use these syndicates to threaten workers, to follow them to industrial tribunals and to collectively threaten them to abandon the dispute or face consequences. These are new types of accumulation therefore taking over through criminal activity, threatening and attacking the working class and their communities. This isn’t unique at all to the workplace; churches, schools, and community bodies, all of them are suffering extortion through crime syndicates. Every institution of the community, not just worker organisations, is under immense stress in this period of recomposition.

How does the centre reproduce itself?

Funding for the Advice Office is mainly reliant on philanthropic funding and support. We offer all of our services to workers for free, so we need to get funding from elsewhere than the workers themselves. Money is always a threat and a risk, and there is the large issue of corruption in the trade unions. Worker money always disappears in these large institutions, and we’ve taken our time to avoid these issues. The Simunye Workers Forum has introduced a subscription fee as of two years ago, a nominal charge which workers can pay off throughout the year. If they cannot pay, of course, then support is not withdrawn. Many members are unemployed - given the fluidity of employment in the area, people go through work and unemployment at a high rate.

The work of the organisers is quite varied; some go out early in the morning to different areas to meet with workers, others are based at the office itself. On Saturdays, we have groups of workers coming in if they’re having bargaining issues and disputes, and we go through worker rights with them if they’re facing industrial tribunal meetings. We try to have workers really understand their rights, and to represent themselves in these matters. We try to only offer representation if a worker feels very uncomfortable doing so themselves, as we want to support them taking action themselves. We cannot be too romantic about this, though; these tribunals are normally viciously anti-worker, and we could be throwing workers to the wolves - but in the long run, we want workers to be fighting their battles and guiding the process, as well as being able to assist others. Legal and rights education, therefore, often takes priority, and political education and work takes a back seat, sadly.

The Advice Office, to be clear, is not a membership organisation, or a worker-controlled space. We are a registered NGO, while the Simunye Workers Forum is a worker-controlled space. Although there is a close relationship between them, we are very aware of the danger of trying to exert influence over it, and would never act in its name or curtail its independence. The workers in the forum might sometimes wait for us to take the lead in certain things, or take the risks, but we are conscious of this process and work against it when we can. We don’t always get things right, and there are inherent dangers in trying this kind of hybrid model. Our perspective is that the forum needs to find its own place, and its own rhythm of activity.

The difficulty for us, and likely elsewhere, is that workers come to us with very little organisational experience. They have often never been in a union, or been out on strike, as is the case with many of those we are supporting in this current dispute at Mister Sweet. This means workers are quickly having to learn how to make practical and tactical decisions - how to spend the strike fund, how to decide on transport or logistics for a struggle, for example - and this can be a difficult process. This is all part of the process of building a new movement.

This also means there can be difficulties and problems in the Forum, with patriarchal and xenophobic backlash from some workers involved, for example, which we have to always consciously work against. Given the society we are in, we are swimming against the current. The old labour movement emerged from a period of militant working class struggle against apartheid, but we are in a very different moment, one of working class retreat. There is always fight, but not on the levels we would all like to see!

How does the CWAO get itself rooted in the community, alongside its relation to worker disputes?

So, for example, last weekend there was a big football tournament in one of the townships. We went out there with our mobile van, our speakers and our gazebo, handing out pamphlets and talking with members of the community - particularly the youth, which there is a clear absence of in the movement. This tournament, running over successive weekends, is something we will continue to head along to, make ourselves known and participate in it; sponsoring the event, donating footballs and kit, that kind of thing. We make sure to interact with the community at this kind of level, too. Last month, in August, for example, it was the period of time where families had to start registering children for schools. Very bizarrely, the government make people register online. So we opened our computer centre so local people could come in and register, which is necessary when there is limited access to computer literacy within the community.

We try to get linked up with and support not just political organisations working locally, but other spaces of civic activity, like grocery or funeral co-operatives which the working classes are participating in and building solidarity through. This helps us express our politics and educate ourselves about the experience of crisis, which hits us not just in the factory, but through our everyday lives, in housing or water crises and the like.

You mention issues like patriarchal politics and the impact it has on organising, could you explain that further?

We have always tried to be very conscious of gender politics within our approach to worker organising. We started the office with three women and one man, which wasn’t an accident. We know that neoliberalism has had a major impact on how women are now in the labour market, and the extra burdens that this also entails. Women are dominant in certain precarious sectors - like in food processing, which we organise a lot within. This is then reflected in the forum. While women do not automatically make up a majority of the forum, there is a parallel organisation, the Simunye Women Workers Forum which meets regularly. We haven’t built a manifesto around this as such, but we have undertaken a process of trying to distil key questions and demands around shift work and night work, which have a major impact on the women workers involved.

We also try to have this dynamic formalised through our constitution; a woman must chair or minute the meeting, whether that’s a full forum meeting or a smaller one, in order for it to be constitutional and binding. The majority of standing members must be women, too. We see that women often lead the campaigns around education and in many of the centre’s activities, and we try to support that as much as possible. Women have taken the lead in recent disputes for example, making tactical decisions like camping outside of the factory overnight.

There has often been backlash though, with some men arguing that there should be parity in the constitution - but many see through what this really means, in trying to subvert a feminist politics that is being built in the centre. There is not necessarily a huge amount of familiarity with long traditions of feminist struggle and thinking, nor of socialist history on the topic. So, there are limitations in experience, and that can have an impact. We gain a lot of knowledge, however, because the bulk of our organiser staff are former worker leaders, many who were permanent workers dismissed due to strike activity, and these kinds of firsthand experiences help to build our radical politics and culture.

How has the worker centre related to other similar projects?

We’ve had quite a range of experiences engaging with international unions and supporters - some good, some not so good. We have trade unionists from other countries visit, and they are always very warmly welcomed and engaged by the workers here. These unionists sit in our meetings and participate in the ways that they can. We have had researchers visit too, who want to hear about our experiences and the workers’ struggles. Often, we do get people from funding organisations, which shapes how they want to interact with the centre and have an NGO mindset toward it. We have intermittent contact and discussions with networks of workers elsewhere, particularly throughout Southern Africa, maybe most meaningfully with workers in Lesotho - usually with plantation and farm workers, and some domestic workers. These can be useful, but it’s hard to tell what happens after a meeting or an online call. We have trade union bureaucrats, who love flying around the globe, come to meet us - but it’s not necessarily clear what happens when they return home, or what’s achieved.

When we have had major disputes, such as with Volvo or with Heineken, we have tried to draw on old, historical networks (some of which go back all the way to the international brigades that travelled to fight against Franco!) which can be useful, but sometimes they are not very positive. International unions are sceptical of supporting these workers, many of whom are not organised through unions. If these workers are not union members, there must be something wrong with them, right? We’ve had better experiences with other countries, like with solidarity from Argentina, perhaps due to similar conditions and experiences. One international component which has been important, recently, has been mobilisation in solidarity with Palestine. Historically, that might have happened through Muslim communities in the country and through some political networks, but now we see it far more broadly. Perhaps it’s due to the constant media coverage and visibility of what’s happening in Gaza. While we have not necessarily been able to conduct major actions, we have certainly taken it on symbolically. When we’ve been out pamphleting for the recent strike, for example, there have been lots of Palestinian flags with us, and people being very vocal about the struggle. It has a definite political effect.