One of the privileges of being a member or an official of a trade union is the annual (or different frequency) wage offers and counter-offers aka wage negotiations. This is one of those fascinating phenomena of the modern economy, at least as experienced in SA. Grown men and women attend expensively arranged, even more expensively conducted meetings at which they have a contest of demands and denials. This carries on for a few days, while the business that supposed to fund the whole thing and the eventually agreed upon increase on wages and other benefits of employment, chugs along on the same basis and same rate of output as 5 years previously.
The management stick to their guns, the union escalates their demands and rhetoric and sometime in the future they all agree, shake hands and go back home or back to the head office. This unworkable and archaic method of interaction between the worker and the employer will be employed again in the next round of negotiations and for the forseeable future. In the meantime the workers will remain pretty much where they are at the moment - between the rock (the job) and the hard place (the trade union). There is of course the believe that the power and strength of the workers is the trade union. I believe the opposite - it is the workers that lend strength, power and legitimacy to the trade union. I can never understand how people who do not work the same, do not have the same dedication, do not have the same loyalty - should be rewarded the same. What do I know, I am just a middle class neo-liberal counter-revolutionary whose mind is shorter than his BEE shoes - the kind that arrive at the door before their owner, as Dr Nzimande eloquently describes them.
That the employers the world over exploit workers and treat them slightly better than the tools and machinery operated by the very workers is without doubt. Similarly, there is so much more to a working man or woman's life than wages. Yet wages remain the mainstay of any of these annual or however frequent meetings of demands. Trade unions in my view have the same effect on true worker power that the church has on true faith - but let us not unzip that pair of pants as yet.
This brings me to the point of this post, pretentious as that may sound, I do have a point to make and it is about teachers. Teaching is a proffession I love, contrary to popular believe. When I was still studying I had a few friends who were teachers. I remember having what I thought was a friendly chat with one of them about whether teachers should be organised or organise themselves like workers; whether teachers should form and belong to trade unions as they are known through-out our capitalist SA? This chat was inspired by my love for the profession in the face of what I believed to be an assault on the noble profession. He did not believe that I could be serious, he in his words thought I was making a joke - of course teachers are workers - just like my father who at the time was working for a rugby head-honcho who made kunsmis (scientific shit) and money as a hobby. My friend, who started work at 8am and finished at 3pm (I know I'm being generous but for the sake of this post I will equate being at work with working), pretty much determined his work routine and outcomes - believed that he is no different to my father. That fateful afternoon was the end our relationship as we both had known it. We disagreed and parted ways having said things we both lived to regret.
I tried to impress upon my friend (thanks to liberal arts under-grad education) that the whole fight between the bosses and the workers (pronounced "whackers") is the surplus value and that it is this surplus value that the bosses seek to increase and the workers wish to eat into. Having spend considerable amount of time fielding all manner of questions about Marx and his comrades and what I thought was a straight-forward determination of surplus value in any profit-driven enterprise, all I managed to do was to really anger my friend (as he then was).
If the teachers are workers just like those who produce scientific shit, then they will need bosses. The bosses in the teachers case shall be the government represented by the minister of education and of public service. Workers are paid out of the funds of the company that employs them or out of the overdraft of that company (the latter more so lately). Workers' salaries and benefits are part of the cost of production - the idea is generally speaking that the workers should meet the cost of production and then leave the cream of the income otherwise known as profits for the bosses to enjoy. I am not sure what the production is where teachers are concerned and how the cost of that production is to be measured. If teaching be the enterprise, what is the income side that is meant to mirror and balance the expense side? Ok, maybe school-fees, taxes, fund-raising and maybe even donations. It is not like parents pay more for teachers who do their job well and produce good results. This is another debate because fundamentally the good results are produced by the learners/pupils with the guidance of the teachers. Just in case the reader got lost, I am not talking about private schools here - in any event those schools are never affected by such noble causes as teacher trade unions and chalk-downs.
The era of teacher-trade unions have reduced what used to be a noble profession to a toyi-toying mass of shame-less lemmings. I had the benefit of a township education back in the day when teachers were professionals and commanded respect and/or fear. The fear inducing type commanded less respect and are remembered accordingly - nevertheless, they were teachers and occupied a special place in society. They also appear to have been rewarded accordingly - that seems to have changed somewhat dramatically over the years and maybe that is the reason there is a belief that trade unions is the way to go. A poor solution coming from those we trust to train the minds of our young ones.
There is of course a great benefit to our goverment, specifically the ANC and the tri-partite alliance that teachers, police and nurses form and belong to trade unions. With a constituency that large, one can't go wrong in national elections - that too is another story for another post.
Regardless of the incoherent pontifications of Mr Nxesi and the other comrade-educators, they are members of the professional class where labour is unrelated to production and surplus value is not part of the equation. The existence of the teaching and other administrative strata is to support and to created aspiration for capital. Comrade-educator does not focus the minds of the learners on the assembly line or underground drilling and excavation type of work. The target, we are led to believe is scientist, philosophers and other such like great callings.
There is also the interesting position of the old-school type teacher who does not want to belong to the trade union, to put his chalk down or to toyi-toyi. The sad stories of these teachers are too sad to repeat. All of this is made even worse by the fact that as the teachers chant Marx (whom they hardly ever read) their own children are happily chanting a sonet in the comfort of a school and under the supervision of a teacher that does not belong to or support a trade union. In the meantime, the child of the Cosatu comrade is loitering and passing time until he is old enough to replace his or her parent as another worker.
It is I believe Marx who said something uncanny about how each class reproduce itself.
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