Jonathan Grossman More than 600 white collar and professional workers at University of Cape Town went on strike on Friday 16 February. The strike was called by the Employees Union (EU), an in-house union of UCT administrative and professional staff.
Initially planned to continue only until 11am on the Monday, the strike was overtaken by unprecedented rank and file determination. Strikers assembled outside the university administration building and created a permanent mass meeting which took its own decisions.
This disrupted plans by the union's leadership for a return to work at different points during the day. UCT management which first expected the strike to fail, and then to disappear over the week-end were forced into serious negotiations.
A mass meeting on Tuesday morning accepted a reorganised offer, with almost all involved claiming victory.
The strike drew solidarity from of the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU), the majority union of the lowest paid workers directly employed by UCT.
However the NEHAWU leadership had already settled, leaving the EU stranded.
With the ethos of competitiveness and individualism dominant amongst students and academics at UCT, there was little support, despite individual exceptions.
It is hard to find any material basis on which the strikers can claim a victory.
But it was clear that something else took place. For the first time in most of their lives, strikers simply defied a university administration that presumed it could take them for granted.
In the process, they discovered that they had the capacity both for collective defiance, and the capacity to disrupt the normal functioning of the university.
A week after the strike, UCT was again disrupted, this time by catering workers in the university residences.
These workers are amongst the hundreds of outsourced workers, following the retrenchment of hundreds of workers by then Vice Chancellor Mamphela Ramphele in 1998. Workers were striking against Royal Sechaba with the demand for a R500 across the board wage increase.
With residence catering shut down, UCT management has been forced to proVeronica Fagan As we go to press, twenty-two trade unionists and media activists remain in custody accused in Sri Lanka of supporting the Tamil Tigers. The media refers to them as Sinhala Tigers, though in fact five of those in detention are Tamils from the plantation areas.
Four of those detained came in front of Colombo magistrate Sarojina Wijewardana on May 8. During the hearing it was revealed that there was no legal detention order allowing them to be held, but at the same time the magistrate said she was unable to release them as she had no power under the emergency regulations.
These regulations allow arrests without warrants and without evidence - the slightest suspicion is enough. Those arrested can be detained indefinitely, without charge and without access to either lawyers vide each affected student with R60 per day simply for food - more than half of what the workers are paid per day.
UCT administration tries to deny any responsibility in a dispute between workers and a private company.
But it is UCT management which is responsible for outsourcing in the first place and for seeking to drive down the costs of providing necessary services.
All workers at UCT - whoever employs them - are facing a university administration which is another example of what is happening throughout the public sector: privatisation, outsourcing, inadequate state funding, commercialisation, an ethos of cost-recovery, and an aggressive managerialism to impose all of this. i State repression deepens
The situation has
become so extreme that even the normally
friendly British
government has been
Ashamed into announcing a freeze on
foreign aid at the
beginning of May. LIV