This Day in Labor History: August 16, 2012
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On August 16, 2012, the South African Police Service killed 34 striking platinum miners. The Marikana Massacre was the most lethal use of force against civilians by the South African police since the Soweto Uprising in 1976 and was a sign of how the African National Congress had moved away from its working class roots and toward become an instrument of oppression that reminded some had little things really had changed since the days of apartheid.
As with a lot of non-communist but still leftist revolutionary movements that succeed, unions became part of the post-apartheid state. Mexico and the PRI is the classic example of this. As a major South African industry and one where oppression of Black miners ran deep, mining played an outsized role in the nation’s labor history. The 1946 mineworkers strike is arguably the moment when organized resistance to the apartheid state began. The National Union of Mineworkers became closely allied with the African National Congress. The labor movement had developed a lot of ANC leadership. But with the ANC in power, would workers still be militant for their own rights? Increasingly, the answer was no, as their own leaders told workers to hold back in support of the larger struggle. But that larger struggle was becoming obviously no struggle at all, with the post-Mandela ANC riven with corruption and centralized power.
So a new independent union developed. The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union formed in 1998 as a breakaway from the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the official ANC-sponsored labor movement. Like in PRI-Mexico, this was seen as unacceptable by both the state and the official labor movement. The AMCU framed itself as non-political, only caring about workers’ rights. This was important, if perhaps counterintuitive from the outside, for what had political unionism brought except selling out the workers. For years, these two organizations fought but it was pretty easy for the government to not take the AMCU that seriously. However, beginning in around 2010, workers began moving toward the newer organization. The platinum miners especially had become alienated from official unionism.
The work for platinum miners remained quite dangerous and it was these working conditions that drove the dissent. The strike that led to the Marikana Massacre was led by the rock drill operators. These guys labored deep underground and they wanted something more than the poverty wages they were getting. If the ANC was not going to work for them, they would look elsewhere. The government had recently caved at one mine and doubled wages. The Marikana workers wanted their wages to triple. There was a big debate after the massacre about whether the AMCU had misled the workers into believing they could win such a massive wage increase, but I think that’s rather beside the point here. The broader issue is that since the decline of apartheid, the material lives of these workers had not improved, while for ANC and state-sponsored union leaders, fancy cars and big cigars had become the norm. They could see the corruption and they did not like it.
On August 10, 2012, the workers struck. This was a wildcat strike. They had a collective bargaining agreement through the National Union of Mineworkers, the official union of the state. But the NUM not only refused to support the workers and their needs, they were actively hostile to them, following the men who buttered their bread inside the ANC. Tensions rose quickly. The next day, the workers marched on NUM offices. Some of NUM leaders opened fire on the workers and wounded a couple of them. Rumors spread that some of the workers had died.
Violence escalated quickly. The South African Police Force (SAPS) was openly on the side of the mine and the official unions. Lonmin, the British company who owned the mine, also hired private thugs. Some of the miners were armed too. On August 12, two Lonmin thugs were killed. On August 13, continued confrontations led to three dead workers and two dead cops. The leadership of both unions began to try and work out some kind of agreement. But on August 16, SAPS decided to go full thuggery and end the strike by force. Its forces opened fire at two locations. At both locations, 17 workers were killed, for a total of 34. 78 were wounded as well. Then the police arrested 270 workers and charged them with the murder of their own comrades.
South African president and ANC leader Jacob Zuma claimed he was “shocked and dismayed” by the killings. Yeah, maybe. What he really didn’t like was the international attention this brought to a strike that no one outside the nation had cared about before the killings. Protests quickly developed around the country over both the police violence and the arrest and bogus charges of the workers. Those charges were quickly dropped. Even some leading ANC members publicly criticized the charges, and you didn’t see a lot of internal dissension going that public. Unsurprisingly, upon their release, many of the workers talked of the beatings they had received while in jail.
Moreover, it did not end the problems in mining. Rather, wildcat strikes spread. Lonmin talked that it might go bankrupt. It tried to force workers back on the job with ultimatums about being fired, but few workers returned. Meanwhile, Zuma sent in the military to keep the peace, i.e., serve his own interests and those of the mining companies. The workers in the end did get a small wage increase of between 11 and 22 percent, which was far, far less than they wanted and really means they effectively lost the strike. They did get paid for the wages they lost during the strike as well. The peace was finally worked out with the church as a moderating force. The official unions worried that this would set precedent that other workers might take the initiative and fight outside official channels for their rights too. What a horror.
In the aftermath, Zuma’s primary interest was insuring that foreign investors would feel comfortable running mines in South Africa. The different union blamed each other. The South African Communist Party was 100% behind the Zuma response and defended the police. In conclusion, Nelson Mandela’s vision of South Africa was….not precisely fulfilled. AMCU did become the dominant union at the Lonmin mine and the government recognized it as such.
This is the 574th post in this series. Previous posts in this series are archived here.