Franco Barchiesi

Trade Unions and Organisational Restructuring in the South African Automobile Industry: A Critique of the Co-Determination Thesis1

Abstract

The concept of ‘co-determination’ has received growing attention from South African scholars in industrial sociology. Some argue that recent institutional and legislative developments in the sphere of workplace union representation and tripartite social and economic policy making provide trade unions with important opportunities. In this perspective, changes in the industrial relations system are considered as first steps for a system of German-style ‘co-determination’. This would allow union strategies to combine a positive approach to productivity and competitiveness inside the workplace with their aims for a more equitable distribution of power and rewards in a context of fundamental social change. However, findings in this paper, based on research in the South African automobile industry, challenge this picture, especially at the workplace level. Some successful cases of adaptation to changing global pressures in the South African automobile industry are to be found in companies who have substantially rejected the co-determinist approach. These companies have been able to combine highly authoritarian technological innovation with a unilateral restructuring of work and production organisation, and the persistence of hierarchies and forms of inequality embedded in an enduring corporate paternalism. Conversely, the introduction of co-determinist methods in other companies has led to processes of cooptation of union structures, grassroots rebellion and even workers’ rejection of national centralised agreements.

Introduction

The transition to a democratic political system in post-Apartheid South Africa has been accompanied by remarkable shifts in paradigms in industrial sociology and labour studies. In particular, relevant literature has increasingly emphasised factors promoting an institutional and organisational environment conducive to macroeconomic hegemonic frameworks. Two factors contribute to give current intellectual debates a sense of policy urgency. From one side, high levels of conflict have traditionally affected the South African industrial relations system, with militant working class organisations opposed to employers and the state. A widespread culture of worker resistance encompassed both the struggle for worker control of production and popular mobilisation for democracy. However, this legacy of confrontation has gradually come to be regarded by the new democratic state as increasingly disfunctional for the restructuring of South African capitalism in relation to global competition. From

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another side, the transition to democracy was politically structured and dominated by the African National Congress (ANC), a party with a strong working class support, and formally allied with the powerful union federation, COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions2). COSATU defined at a strategic level a commitment to the socio-economic reconstruction of the country through democratic participative institutions.

The search for an industrial relations environment to promote global efficiency and competitiveness implied for some sociological orientations an ‘actor-centred’ approach (Webster, 1997). This aimed at institutionalising strong collective organisations and interests inside procedures and structures geared towards greater consen.3 The need to define terrains of consent on industrial and economic policy, beyond the traditional capital-labour distributive adversarialism, is translated into institutional arrangements at various levels. Essentially, this includes the articulation, first, of tripartite forums representing capital, labour and the state at a national centralised level, a system which is sometimes defined as ‘concertation’ or ‘democratic corporatism’ (Baskin, 1995). Second, sectoral collective bargaining has increasingly assumed the double function of definition of industrial policy (which includes productivity deals, social pacts, and accords on managing the consequences of industrial restructuring), and of centralisation of negotiations on distributional issues (such as wages). Third, recent legislation provided for consent-based, participative regulatory frameworks at the workplace level. The adaptation of work and production organisation to enhance productivity, quality and flexibility up to the peculiar requirements of companies and sectors is largely delegated to this level, where the need for a mutual approach transcending adversarialism has been particularly emphasised by sociologists and policy-makers alike.

The analysis which follows is focused on dynamics and developments at the third of the above mentioned ‘levels’. In particular, I will provide a critical discussion of recent trends in sociological theory supporting the case for workplace ‘co-determination’ in South African workplaces. Relevant themes which emerged in local literature on the concept will be related to research findings from the automobile industry. My basic argument is that, even if the notion of ‘co-determination’ has a considerable prescriptive power in relation to desired policy outcomes, it does not, nonetheless, represent a real advance for the analysis of South African workplace industrial relations. It is moreover of a limited explanatory power in relation to complex patterns of redefinition of social relations at the point of production, and to alternatives and unintended consequences that are generated by these processes.

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Adaptation and Transcendence: Why does Co-Determination Appeal to South African Sociologists?

The influence of overseas models has strongly influenced recent South African labour law. In particular, it is remarkable how the German mitbestimmung (co-determination or co-responsibility) system was read in South Africa as providing a vehicle for industrial regeneration, flexible adaptation to local and sectoral realities, and labour enhancement in the form of skill development, high remuneration and employment security. As a result, numerous industrial sociologists have considered the Labour Relations Act of 1995 as not only opening possibilities for a ‘German-style’ industrial relations system, but also as defining ‘co-determination’ as a possible ‘new frontier’ for consensual relationships, particularly at the plant level. At the end of the 1990s ‘co-determination’ is a crucial focus of debate about changes in South African industrial relation.4 More generally, this is a signal of a rising trend in South African industrial sociology towards prioritising the role of institutional and economic environments in promoting social-industrial citizenship and social and human capital for virtuous industrial outcomes.

However, the ‘model’ which inspired such enthusiasm, the German system of co-determination, is a highly problematic one. It is ridden with internal ambiguities, opened to potentially contradictory outcomes and highly dependent on mutable, unstable, contingent relations between centralised bargaining and local adjustment. While South African advocacy of co-determination abounds with idealisations of the German model, few of them really come to terms with the historicity of the system, its social and ideological preconditions, and the recent changes in social and labour market composition that are currently redefining the system. Further, an inclination to read co-determination as the ‘secret’ of a North European industrial success based on social compacts between capital and labour is well entrenched in such analyses. As a result, a tendency exists for the ‘institutional’ outcome of particular processes and balances of forces to become a ‘model’ of virtuous relationships, a set of de-historicised prescriptive assumptions whose conceptual legitimacy is based mainly on the desirability of its outcomes.

While a critique of mitbestimmung as such is beyond the scope of this paper, it is however worth focusing on its peculiar historical and institutional location. The principle of co-determination as embodied in the experience of the works councils in German plants implies two preliminary assumptions. First, a diversity of interests between employers and employees is recognised as legitimate. Second, rather than imposing a unitarian consensus, the system aims to find ways to provide for long-term stability and profitability for the firm through the adoption of mutual compromises that recognise the role of independent worker representation in contributing to product and process improvements for market success. To this end, works councils are awarded specific rights to information, consultation and co-decision making, which makes co-determination qualitatively different from schemes of ‘worker involvement’ or ‘worker

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participation’. On the other hand, the smooth functioning of the system can be ensured only if the works councils are insulated from conflict-generating issues, such as wage setting, that are referred to collective bargaining.

In this view, a conflict-free industrial relations environment would promote worker commitment to the competitive success of the company. A management style more sensitive to employees’ needs would be encouraged, since managers would accept the trade-off between increasing worker influence in organisation of production and increasing employment protection, from one side, and rising productivity, quality and flexibility from the other (Rogers and Streeck, 1993). In Streeck’s (1992:p.164) words:

The most adequate metaphor would probably be that of a mutual incorporation of capital and labour by which labour internalizes the interests of capital just as capital internalizes those of labour, with the result that works councils and management become subsystems of an integrated, internally differentiated system of industrial government which increasingly supersede the traditional pluralist-adversarial system of industrial relations (own emphasis).

In Sabel’s view, this pattern of localised cooperative interactions could even provide for a transcendence of the traditional union model focused on distributive bargaining, in favour of opportunities for new kinds of unions that would find in the enhancement of local competitiveness and in the management of employment flexibility their main raison d’etre. This prospect apparently assumes the firm’s rationality as the supreme regulator of social dynamics, with income and employment security confined to the status of purely dependent variables. The co-determination concept allows, at the same time, for the matching of two complementary preoccupations. From one side, co-determination is emphasised as ushering in a new notion of the firm, which shifts from terrain of adversarial confrontation over the distribution of private profits to a public good where production of a competitive output is the unifying theme for opposite interests. This is sometimes portrayed as a cornerstone of an ‘alternative capitalism’ (Albert, 1993). From another side, the concept of co-determination underlines the importance of flexibility of local institutions and coalitions between capital and labour to define virtuous processes of adaptation to global competition (Belanger, Edwards and Haiven, 1994). The emphasis on specific employment and production issues allows therefore to combine the promise of the ‘other capitalism’ with enhanced possibilities for adaptation in co-determinist agreements.

Co-determination's double promise seems to explain much of the current fascination with the concept among South African industrial sociologists, including intellectuals who claim not to have abdicated from the search of alternatives. However, other, more problematic aspects of the co-determination debate are relatively neglected in the ways this concept has been received in South Africa. For reasons of brevity I will limit myself to a very schematic description of these aspects.

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German-style co-determination was shaped by historical contingencies and social and institutional balances of forces that are currently heavily challenged by pressures towards liberalisation and industrial relations convergence around more individualist patterns:

To ensure highly competitive labour markets, governments are finding ways to remove much of the institutional protections accorded to unions in the past. The long-term goal behind [these] ad-hoc measures is to reduce state reliance on collective bargaining as the principal wage-setting mechanism for the economy. Wages which were once protected from international competitive pressures by regularized collective bargaining agreements now are to fluctuate with the business cycle and more closely reflect international price movements (Drache, 1996:pp.46-47).

These pressures can substantially modify the meaning and working of co-determinist frameworks even where they are most strongly entrenched. As Baethge and Wolf (1995:p.258) underline, German co-determination could work as a consent-generating mechanism in a ‘win win’ context in so far it could provide for a redistribution at a decentralised level of the fruits of economic growth and productivity increases. But in the present context, downward pressures on workers’ income due to a cheaper labour supply in post-reunification East Germany and to strategies of capital internationalisation and decentralisation, are enabling companies to ask work councils to allow for increasing flexibility on remuneration, working conditions and production schedules. This process, coupled with competition between Laender to provide most favourable conditions for investment re-awakens union concerns with bread and butter issues, related to distribution and job security, and a more intense polarisation in German workplace industrial relations (Visser and Van Ruysseveldt, 1996). Further, the modification of power relations in favour of employers prevents an institutional transfer of mitbestimmung to East Germany (Hyman, 1996), and rather presents further threats to the system itself in the West.

Rather than embodying a trend towards ‘best practices’ endowed with a self-evident superior rationality, co-determination is a site of contestation and temporary accommodation, which depends on the relative strength of the actors involved: pressures deriving from rising unemployment levels, labour cost competition from neighbouring low-wage areas and decentralisation of bargaining can well turn works councils towards serving aims and purposes that are quite far from workplace democratisation, enrichment and empowerment. In fact, signals exist that the nature of works councils as ‘workplace productivity coalitions’ is increasingly translated into local arrangements based on workers’ concessions on work organisation and time schedules in a way that separates decision-making from industrial union organisation (Smith and Elger, 1997:p.292). Following on a similar argument, Upchurch (1996) concludes that pressures on collective bargaining will likely confine workplace productivity pacts to a mainly defensive function based on increasing workers’ retreats from national wage-setting as ways to protect job security, an outcome that is

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potentially conducive to forms of company unionism (see also Streeck, 1992:p.167). In this perspective mitbestimmung, deprived of any real worker-empowering property, would be translated into mere Ueberlebenspakten (survival pacts). Observable trends testify to the advance of this ‘new’ form of co-determination in Eastern establishments competing for Western investment. Increasing decentralisation of bargaining is, in any case, supported by writers who regard it as the most suitable way to mobilise worker consent for ‘concerted’ wage restraint as part of local productivity pacts in the crisis of Keynesian patterns of regulation (Regini, 1996).

It is relevant here to notice that prospects of reversal of the gains of co-determination, even if formal structures of mitbestimmung are maintained, should alert us of the dangers of institutional determinism implied in schemes of causal relations between institutional frameworks and economic outcome. In their words, rather than absolutising co-determination as an engine and a ‘secret’ of the German economic ‘miracle’, the above observations seem to suggest that it was the ‘miracle’ itself which created the system of co-determination, now endangered by countervailing shifts in the socio-economic environment. A fervent advocate of co-determination like Wolfgang Streeck (1992:p.167) seems well aware of this. He recognises, in fact, that the stabilisation and invariability of labour made possible by co-determination may define, in an age of mass unemployment, new intra-working class divisions. At the same time this situation can insulate workers in co-determined enterprises from the social devastation carried by unemployment. In this way, Streeck concludes, new divisions would emerge between workers along lines (company boundaries and internal labour markets) designed by capital. Moreover, pressures towards decentralisation of negotiations and decision-making may reinforce trends towards a ‘low cost’ approach by weakening unions (Bezuidenhout and Slabbert, 1998: pp.2-17).

Co-Determination in South African Debates: Towards Workplace Democracy?

The Labour Relations Act (LRA) of 1995 substantially reshaped the normative framework for industrial relations in South Africa. In particular, the LRA seemed to provide a link between flexibility and voluntarism, both advocated by business, and regulation and invariabilities required by union-sponsored views of employment relations and job creation. The act entails a compromise which internalised in some ways the German focus on ‘virtuous rigidities’, where co-determinist structures are intended to provide a bridge between employment stability and workforce efficiency (Streeck, 1992). The act, and its accompanying documents, contributed a rationale for restructuring industrial relations, which went beyond competencies usually assumed in a capitalist country by a piece of labour legislation. In particular, the legal task team charged with drafting the bill posited an explicit link between developing a competitive production on the global markets and the need to enforce a conflict-free, participative workplace environment, geared towards moderation and compromise between the actors involved:

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South Africa’s re-entry into international markets and the imperatives of a more open economy demand that we produce value-added products and improve productivity levels. To achieve this, major restructuring is required ... workplace-based institutions for worker representation and labour/management communication – a ‘second chann’ of industrial relations ... Workplace restructuring has been most successful in those countries where participatory structures exist: for example, Japan, Germany and Sweden. If we are to have any hope of successfully restructuring our industries and economy, then management and labour must find new ways of dealing which each other (Ministerial Legal Task Team, 1995).

At the same time, the debate on macroeconomic policy in the democratic transition witnessed a shift: a previously dominant emphasis on inward-looking industrialisation, support for internal demand, provision of social services and basic infrastructure (Macroeconomic Research Group, 1993) was replaced by an option that privileged a focus on niche markets, and the development of comparative advantages and high value-added production for export (Marais, 1998:pp.155-156) in a high-skill, high productivity growth path, in what came to be known as ‘intelligent production’ (Joffe, 1995). This choice underlined for the industrial working class the virtues of accepting wage moderation and trade-offs between entitlements, such as wages and working conditions, achieved through contractual, adversarial processes, and the productivity-related wage benefits deriving from a closer cooperation and corporate identification with the firm.

Moreover, this shift was in line with developments in macro-economic policy signalled by the adoption by the Government, in June 1996, of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR). The new approach to industrial relations and industrial policy, in fact, assuaged two crucial concerns in GEAR. First, the rising emphasis on the competitiveness of the private sector as the main engine for growth contained in the above mentioned documents matched GEAR’s advocacy for a reduction of state intervention in the economy, deficit reduction and stringent fiscal discipline. Second, the convergence of industrial policy analyses around workplace cooperation and democratisation, and their support for moderation and compromise, met GEAR’s stress on domestic and international investors’ confidence as means to achieve the desired ends.

It is apparent how the restructuring of workplace social relations assumed a crucial relevance for a whole process of socio-economic change. At the same time, many questions remained open about the chances of success of such an effort, which focused on private sector, individual competition, wage restraint, and constraints on state intervention. In fact, the centrality of the trade union movement in the anti-apartheid struggle had nurtured a view of ‘liberation’ which, beyond political democratisation, entailed a strong culture of collective entitlements, a decisive state role in meeting basic needs and reducing social inequality, and fundamental socio-economic transformation to be achieved through state control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the

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economy and worker control of production. This latter aspect has been historically rooted in the practice of shop steward committees engaged in both collective bargaining and production-related problems.

The LRA addressed aims of workplace restructuring through a structure that carried a strong resemblance with the German works councils system. The Workplace Forums introduced by the act are union-initiated worker bodies in workplaces with more than 100 employees. The rationale of the forums is to separate collective bargaining issues (such as wages and working conditions), reserved to centralised bargaining by sector, from ‘non distributive’ issues related to work and production organisation and workplace employment relations (Grossett and Venter, 1998: pp.216-219. As a whole, the LRA maintained a strong voluntarist approach to labour relations. In fact, while the act supports centralised collective bargaining, it does not enforce a statutory duty to bargain, preferring to indicate a path to centralisation that relies heavily on labour’s collective power. To this end the act provides a widespread recognition of individual and organisational workers’ rights and envisages procedures for the extension of agreements to non parties.

At the same time, the emphasis on negotiated solutions and extension procedures signals a substantial preoccupation in the act with adapting nationally negotiated minimum standards to diverse local needs, especially of small business, uncompetitive areas, and generally all those sections of capital more dependent for their survival on labour cost containment and reduction of workers’ guarantees. In fact, the act is deliberately vague about the precise scope of centralised bargaining, the possibility of integrative wage negotiations, the clear demarcations between what are to be considered ‘consultative’ and ‘joint decision making’ workplace issues. These aspects are left substantially to regulation through negotiation at both central and plant level. This strong element of privatisation of relationships, reinforced by provisions for the resolution of disputes through mediation and arbitration, and the support present in the act for measures encouraging flexibility constitute in some way a departure from the emphasis on uniformity, co-decision making and job security contained in German Works Councils’ regulations (Rogers and Streeck, 1993). On the other hand, it is precisely these characteristics of the new workplace relations system which make Baskin and Satgar (1996:p.104) define the innovative features of this system under the heading ‘regulated flexibility’. In their view the LRA provided for a groundwork of basic rules, minima and guarantees, but without clear definitions and with a substantial retreat of the state from the sphere of implementation. The wide scope for voluntarism contained in the act, indeed, allows to government to maintain at the same time two otherwise contradictory aims: to support centralised collective bargaining while at the same time encouraging an industrial relations environment that is conducive to adaptation to the requirements of local dynamics of production and capital valorisation (Labour Market Commission, 1997). In Baskin and Satgar’s words, then, centralisation becomes a vehicle well suited to decentralisation.

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For advocates of co-determination (Baskin, 1995; Adler and Webster, 1995; Macun, Joffe and Webster, 1995; Webster, Macun and Rosenthal, 1997; Du Toit, 1997) the act combines a strong protection for unions, a recognition of workers’ collective power and the flexibility required to empower employees beyond a pure adversarial path. From the latter point of view, in particular, workplace forums would allow unions access to company information, plus guarantees and entitlements that could be used to expand the range of joint decision-making issues, in this way ‘engaging’ the employers to adopt high-skill, high productivity, high-reward growth paths and colonising the sphere previously deemed as managerial prerogative. Moreover, the law’s protections and the prerogatives of the workplace forums would also allow in this view for expanded recruitment opportunities for unions, especially among unorganised workers and in un-unionised sectors. Cooperation and regular, structured workplace interactions would therefore provide an opportunity for the desired trade-off between worker commitment and industrial peace, from one side, and increasing influence and control from the other. The recognition this system receives from central negotiating institutions would make it ‘co-determinist in vision and tripartite in structure’ (Baskin and Satgar, 1996:p.104). On the other hand, as Du Toit (1997:p.41) recognises, the insulation of the point of production from collective bargaining is probably the best way to make unions accept the need for fundamental restructuring of production and employment at the workplace level, therefore thwarting possible union resistance to restructuring that would be enabled by an expansion of collective bargaining.

Webster, Macun and Rosenthal (1997) argue that even if the creation of forums under the new law proceeds at a very slow pace, the act itself can strengthen a significant change in management thinking and orientations with regard to worker participation. In fact, many large companies in South Africa have recently paid particular attention to the development of the human resource and cooperation functions of their organisations. This has included the activation of company committees for consultation and very limited joint decision-making, generally including shop stewards from representative unions. Even if these committees were not formalised under any binding agreement, in some way they anticipated legislation for statutory workplace forums. A realisation was common to those experiences that the required restructuring of production implied the utilisation by management of worker cooperation, communication and initiative, which had to be formalised in company structures capable to provide stability, predictability and cooperation while enhancing managerial legitimacy. However these forums are generally very vulnerable, both because of their lack of formalisation and because of their overlapping with union organisations and collective bargaining issues, while unions maintained a generally suspicious attitude towards managerial unilateralism and attempts to use forums to sidestep unions. Therefore, it can be argued that the main impact of legislated dispensations on workplace forums would be not so much to restructure the South African industrial relations system in a newly fashioned co-determinist model, but rather to stabilise and further legitimise employer-initiated experiments reducing the impact of distributional

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confrontation and demobilising independent worker organisation, in favour of subordinate corporate identification.

On the other hand, these partial, management-initiated experiments were received by the proponents of co-determination as signals of a fundamental shift in managerial culture, the advent of strategic management as strong integration of human resource development functions in the formation of industrial relations managers and a greater management opening to worker participation, with a distinctive ‘co-determination cluster’ of firms emerging (Godfrey, Hirschsohn and Maree, 1997). As a corollary, workplace forums were indicated by the same authors as the only areas in which unions could still have an influence in shaping a workplace restructuring process that was announcing a team-based, multi-skilled, world class manufacturing. It is clear, from the argument of proponents of the system, what are the likely advantages for employers:

Representative consultation contributes to economic performance by improving the flow of information; facilitating the implementation of decisions; reducing absenteeism; helping to handle worker grievances; and helping firms to move towards a more flexible and decentralised organisation of work (Webster, Rosenthal and Macun, 1997:p.23).

It seems that the underlying ideological assumption here is that the competitiveness of the firm is the objective repository of a common good which unifies the different interests of employers and employees, and that therefore the problem is confined to designing institutional and procedural frameworks to make this common good visible and enforcing mutual ‘trust’. >From this point of view, managerial strategies are moving towards recognising that diversity of interests does not necessarily mean that win-win solutions cannot be found around common grounds. On the other hand, for labour the question can be reduced to seizing the opportunities of the new system for an achievement of control and rewards through an enhancement of economic performance of the firm.

However, this set of assumptions about a fundamental, inherent commonality of interests at the workplace level, while internalising a series of policy prescriptions on restructuring and competitiveness, evades fundamental issues of power. In particular, it overestimates the need for employers to achieve their goals through a substantial delegation of power to the workers, while underestimating the range of options and alternatives through which employers can achieve the same aims by enforcing workers’ corporate identity through compliance, top-down communication, intra-workplace competition and the eradication of alternative forms of identities and solidarity. In other words, current trends to co-determination in South Africa are seen as reinforcing an objective, immanent outcome whose superiority should be proved, apart from the German example, by its capacity to find mutually satisfying compromises among all the parties involved. To paraphrase what Michie (1997:p.166)

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notices at a broader macroeconomic level: co-determinist and corporatist institutions might facilitate economic performance of the firm by allowing for worker consent for restructuring and the necessary trade-offs, but this says nothing about the content that restructuring would take, and the balance of forces defined by enhanced economic performance: consent and worker participation can be used to promote wage restraint, work intensification and multitasking as pathways for the economic viability of the firm, and to force workers to accept downward compromises in exchange for a relative job security (Bond, 1998:p.35).

Critics of the new dispensation point to the fact that the separation of collective bargaining from the workplace might contribute to sidestep worker representation through shop stewards and to weaken rank-and-file bargaining power, especially in the less competitive sectors, while at the same time the centralisation of collective bargaining can make unions reliant on their performance at this level, rather than on their grassroots’ strength, therefore facilitating processes of bureaucratisation (Etkind, 1995). A weakening of union solidarity coupled by a rising demobilisation of the rank and file has been observed in recent research in this regard (Ray, 1998). As a solution to this problem, Karl von Holdt (1995), starting from the inherent incompatibility between workplace forums and shop steward representation, advocates expanded competencies for forums to include collective bargaining issues. However, an opposing line of criticism points out that in South Africa it is collective bargaining which determines the extent of worker participation, and that issues dealt with at the level of workplace forums can still be the object of strikes, differently from Germany, where legislation defines the ambit of worker participation, and strike action is limited in this regard (Anstey, 1997:p.181). In this perspective, then, it is precisely an incomplete separation of collective bargaining from participation, which prevents a ‘real’ co-determinist system to emerge. Therefore, from this set of criticisms, a first question emerges on the South African co-determination debate: to what extent do changes in the industrial relations legislation reinforce trends towards co-determination in South Africa, compared to other ways to achieve worker participation without a co-determinist regime? Does the reinforcement of such trends imply the removal of grassroots worker organisations from traditionally conflictual concerns that have shaped the history of union struggles in South Africa? Which alternative union model co-determination would lend support to replacement of the ‘adversarial’ model?

Moreover, it could be argued that the lack of a statutory duty to bargain, coupled with an unclear demarcation of consultation and joint decision-making spheres might strengthen workers’ power and control only in the sectors and companies that are most successful in facing global competition, and are therefore more reliant on a highly skilled workforce. Rather than enforcing a qualitative enhancement of South Africa’s labour, then, the act would therefore merely reinforce existing divisions between highly trained, stable employees and workers in companies more reliant on mere numerical flexibility, cost-cutting, work intensification and low levels of skills (Kester, 1995).

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Second, this fragmentation across companies would be reflected in a rising diversification and decentralisation of employment relations inside single companies, since the act’s provision for exceptions and its focus on mainly minimum standards would facilitate decentralisation of the most labour-intensive, repetitive, de-qualified segments of production, even when they are disguised as outsourcing of ‘non core business’, or when these dynamics require the employment of casuals through labour brokers on outsourced operations. In this way, the proliferation of employment relations with different coverage, guarantees and rewards, the recruitment of atypical work and temporary labour made possible by the flexibility of the regulative framework would undermine worker solidarity and unions’ collective identity at both an inter-plant and intra-plant level. Moreover, the fact that workplace forums apply only to establishments with more than 100 employees would provide no countervailing tendency through joint representative bodies for all workers. This would contribute to the segmentation of the labour market between a core of highly skilled, well paid, highly motivated workers in the more participative and democratic workplaces, especially in those industries more capable of competing internationally, and a majority of workers employed by companies for whom cost-cutting and work intensification are the only available ways to survive (Kraak, 1996).

This outcome is actually foreseen and advocated by economists and sociologists who, allegedly starting from the employment needs of pools of unqualified rural poor and urban structurally unemployed, consider labour’s quest for universalised rights and entitlements across industries as a potential source of rigidities that would make those pools ‘unemployable’. In this perspective, the solution would lie in expanding the opportunities for flexibility contained in the law, up to defining a ‘second tier’ labour market, especially in the ‘small business’ sector for whom only negotiated minima would apply and where rights to union organisation would not be automatically expanded. (Nattrass and Seekings, 1996). However, apart from their faith in the allocative efficiency of the market, a basic flaw in this argument resides precisely in its definition of ‘small business’, which does not take into account the encouragement to decentralisation and fragmentation of product cycles that could be encouraged if the flexibility side of the legislation was strengthened, with the potential for undermining union organisation and creating a labour market dependent on pure labour cost competition that this would entail.

The above illustration of contrasting perspectives allows me at this point to turn my discussion towards an analysis of the specific sector I investigated.

Hitting Diffferent Roads: Strategies for Adjustment in the South African Automobile Industry

(a)Experiments with Participation: Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen

In the last decade, the South African automobile industry has undergone a process of transition based on a fundamental readjustment of production orientation, regulatory

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frameworks and, to a much lesser extent, managerial culture. The insertion of local car manufacturers in international markets after decades of international isolation of the apartheid regime implied, in particular, a shift away from the once dominant pattern of import substitution, dependence of the internal market on foreign auto monopolies, and support for ‘local content’ in production (Southall, 1985). This mode of industrialisation left a legacy of high dependency on imported capital goods and design, market fragmentation due to small volume production of a high number of models in multiple platform configurations (i.e. the combination body-engine-gearbox), low capacity utilisation and a hugely suboptimal production scale (Black, 1994). As a result, multi-line, multi-process production is common among the seven manufacturers currently operating on the market. Government responded to this situation – in the context marked by ‘best practice’ imposed by Japanese producers, homogeneisation of production around modular ‘world car’ models, and fierce competition for investment among emerging markets – with a series of liberalising measures. These were inaugurated in 1989 under the Nationalist Party regime with the Phase VI of the local content programme, and culminated in 1994 with the Motor Industry Development Programme (MIDP) put in place by the ANC government.

The regulatory regime under the MIDP was aimed at encouraging high-quality production for export through a phased elimination of market protections on imported vehicles and components, therefore privileging a liberalisation of internal competition over protection of local content (Financial Mail, 23.02.1996; Sunday Times, 27.10.1996). The government identified the challenge in terms of either being able to develop globally competitive exports or else losing the country’s attractiveness as a site of investment. The nature of adjustment, accelerating the introduction of labour-saving technology due to renewed investment flows from corporate headquarters, and the opening of the domestic market to competition from relatively cheap products, especially from East Asia, placed a heavy downward pressures on worker wages, which combined with generalised threats of retrenchments and downsizing (Desai, 1996). This may seem in contradiction with the fact that all the seven manufacturers were starting experimenting with schemes for worker involvement and participation (including teamwork, quality circles, problem solving schemes) and some were embarking on consultation and joint decision-making co-determinist exercises. However, management's offensive in a phase of liberalisation provided car companies during the 1990s with a decisive advantage that would allow them to substantially diminish the democratising potential of the new participation schemes at the very moment they were implemented.

The auto sector had, in fact, pioneered moves towards co-determination before the 1995 LRA came into effect, providing for many of the innovations which were particularly underlined by supporters of the co-determination thesis in South Africa. In many cases such schemes were introduced as a response to prolonged phases of workplace confrontation. Generally these schemes were not co-determinist in the real sense of the word. In fact, they were management-initiated, with very limited

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prerogatives in the sphere of co-decision making, and a bias towards top-down communication. Elected worker representatives did not appear in these structures, and union shop stewards maintained tasks of both representation and plant negotiation. Moreover, these structures proved generally unstable and precarious. Unions usually regarded them as possible ways to influence company policies, but a consolidation of trust inside these initiatives was substantially absent: union structures continued to be predominant over company structures. In fact, union participation was rather conditioned by mandates given to shop stewards, which could be revoked if these latter were considered as being co-opted by managers.

Volkswagen South Africa (VWSA) was the first to introduce joint union-management committees for consultation and co-decision making on a limited range of issue in its Uitenhage facility. This approach was formalised in the agreement signed with the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) at the end of 1990. VWSA’s experiment drew explicit inspiration from German mitbestimmung (Smith, 1990). However, these committees, while enforcing worker participation, cannot be defined as fully co-determinist: they were management-initiated, with little formalisation and uncertain union loyalty. Moreover, worker participation took place through NUMSA shop stewards, and not through worker representatives elected in specific channels. Finally, in such a system the institutionalisation of the union’s role and spaces open for company-level bargaining were not conducive to a growing collective corporate identity. The Volkswagen experiment rather relied heavily on the capacity of the union to retain an autonomous, militant presence on the shopfloor, inside a framework of relationships in balance between cooperation and open conflict (Maller, 1992).

The preservation of a considerable level of managerial prerogative, coupled with the inability of the system to sidestep the shop stewards as main representatives of the workers, generated tensions that ultimately precipitated a crisis in the system itself. In fact, the VWSA experiment started falling apart when the rank-and-file replaced shop stewards considered too complacent towards a management style considered authoritarian and unconsultative.5 In particular, shop stewards interviewed in early 1995 blamed management for unilateral decision making on issues such as outsourcing and attempting to try to use the internal committee system as a channel of direct communication with the employees to sidestep NUMS.6

Concerns similar to VWSA’s management drove Mercedes-Benz South Africa’s (MBSA) responses to shopfloor militancy. On August-September 1990 the company was affected by a six-week strike, probably the longest and most violent industrial action in the history of the sector. MBSA’s employees were demanding decentralised company bargaining and the company’s withdrawal from the central National Bargaining Forum for the industry. These demands were in direct violation of a national industrial agreement and caused a direct confrontation with NUMSA leadership. The occupation of the plant by the workers eventually ended after a violent

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police intervention (Von Holdt, 1990). The 1990 strike came as the culmination of three years of intense factory conflict, sparked by authoritarian and unilateral methods of management and supervision, strongly characterised by racist practices. Workers recalle7 the workplace environment in that period as pervaded by fear and intimidation, whereby functions such as industrial relations management were regarded as mainly policing tasks. After the strike, MBSA embarked on a major restructuring of management which carried far-reaching implications and an ambitious vision. In the words of NUMSA organizer, Gavin Hartford:

They started to rebuild the company: they totally replaced the management, cleaned up their guys; they turned the company around, a learning organisation, as academics say. Their management team is visionary and very interventionist, both in the plant and in the whole region (author’s interview, 30.08.1995).

Managerial restructuring at MBSA included the recruitment of NUMSA shop stewards into industrial relations and human resource management, permission for NUMSA to recruit among non hourly-paid staff, activation of affirmative action programmes, and recruitment of a new generation of managers educated in a pluralist ideology and human resource development theories.8 Work organisation was adjusted following the introduction of less hierarchical, horizontal forms of coordination. Teamworking was implemented with aims that were particularly ambitious when compared to other car companies. Teams were intended to eliminate supervisory positions, which were to be substituted by ‘facilitators’, incorporating both superintendence and supervision duties to be pursued in cooperation with ‘team managers’. These latter, to be elected by workers in the teams, were required to possess special qualifications and a specific trainin.9 Finally, a ‘negotiating committee’, which included shop stewards and management representatives was set up for consultation over employment policy, and process and productivity issues.

The explicit aim of management was to make work more ‘self-directed’ and ‘self-motivated’. To this end new incentives were introduced such as performance-related rewards for employees and a one-year moratorium on retrenchments to stabilise the workforce in accordance with new productivity targets. However, the experiment with worker participation at MBSA came under severe pressure for reasons which were largely similar to what was experienced at VWSA. Rank-and-file revolt led to the replacement of the shop steward committee in February 1996. This followed management’s resolve to outsource segments of production, introduce a third working shift and proceed with retrenchments to cope with increasing domestic competition.10

Some of the new shop stewards, interviewed in 1997, displayed a rising resentment and suspicion towards the whole system of workplace participation, particularly with regard to its inability to counter unilateral managerial attempts at restructurin.11 In particular, the negotiating committee was criticised for being management-dominated. It was in fact managemen’s prerogative to convene meetings and set the agenda for the

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committee. Shop stewards reported that the committee was generally required to provide merely suggestions on how to improve on decisions that had been already taken by management or on alternative sets of measures suggested by the company, and to ‘share information’. However, some shop stewards recognised that the committee could be used as a negotiating structure to prevent the most adverse consequences of restructuring (to discuss for example, alternatives to retrenchments). But it seems that this function is attributable to the traditional negotiating role of the shop stewards in a conflictual interaction, rather than on the problem-solving nature of the structure itself. Industrial relations managers considered moreover the recruitment of shop stewards in managerial positions as providing the company with a decisive tactical advantage. In fact, this move facilitated direct communication with the workers, while making shop stewards’ moves more predictable. These problems of communication were reflected in a growing estrangement from the operations of the negotiating committee. Mounting distrust towards management made shop stewards highly suspicious of the possibility of converting the existing committee structure into a workplace forum in terms of the LRA. Moreover, shop stewards complained that teamworking did not entail real discussions on production plans and schedules, a view that was echoed by an industrial relations officer according to which teamwork at MBSA consisted mainly in a change in supervisory structures towards more cooperation. On the other hand, shop stewards were generally informed of the co-determinist framework and works council system at Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters in Stuttgart, but they showed a deep distrust of works councillors who ‘dress in suits and ties’ and ‘look like managers’. In this view, such a position would inevitably entail a conflict of interest with the role of representing workers, rather than increasing worker control. Conversely, the part-time shop steward working on the line, a crucial feature of South African workplace union organisation, was still considered as essential to keep in contact with the rank-and-file and prevent co-optation, bureaucratisation and emasculation of the union.

(b)The Technological Road: Nissan and SAMCOR

The decline of experiments of worker participation at VWSA and MBSA does not mean that important differences do not exist in forms of adjustment of workplace social relations among different car companies. The paths undertaken by the two companies above show relevant commonalities in the recognition by both of them that not only a legitimate difference of interests exists in the workplace, but that the establishment of co-operation requires the recognition of an independent presence of union organisations and shop stewards inside company-designed structures of participation. The limitations and ambiguities that I have emphasised in the mode of operation of these structures made these experiments fragile and susceptible to reversals. However, these limitations notwithstanding, this approach comprises a fundamental difference with the path adopted by other companies. Given their emphasis on the incorporation of official union representatives, I will therefore call the MBSA and VWSA approach as the ‘inclusionist road’.

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The ‘inclusionist road’ differs from strategies of adjustment adopted by other companies. Common to these strategies is the emphasis on technological innovation as an objective constraint and limit to worker involvement, the use of technology as a form of rationality embodied in the production process and as an exclusive precinct for a layer of highly qualified operators, a marked division of labour and the resort to multitasking without a parallel enhancement of skills, the reinforcement of hierarchy and of line over staff functions, the use of teamwork and involvement schemes as sophisticated supervision, an emphasis on top-down communication and a more marked attitude towards union avoidance and individualised management-employees relationships. Flowing from my own research on South African Motor Corporation (SAMCOR), I call this second path the ‘technological road’ to restructuring. In actuality, there is no clear divide between the ‘inclusionist’ and the ‘technological’ road: these two paths should be rather thought of as a continuum where, in particular, switching from the former road to the latter is always made possible by the inherently unstable nature of participatory schemes, trends to union cooptation and managerial responses to worker militancy.

The introduction of quality circles or ‘green areas’ at Nissan South Africa, for example, responded to very traditional concerns. Workers were only allowed to meet with the foreman for fifteen minutes a day; only suggestions on how to improve the department’s performance were allowed with the agenda strictly defined by the foreman himself, and no bargaining and union issues allowed (Surtee, 1990:pp.21-26; Thomas, 1998:pp.90-91). Nissan managers reported indeed that the system was explicitly designed to prevent shop stewards’ involvement in handling workplace grievances (Duncan and Payne, 1993:p.18). Conversely, the company is, together with SAMCOR, the most advanced in the introduction of robotic equipment and information technology, which allowed significant intensification of work in multi-product operations. This means that workers are enabled to perform simultaneously a set of basic tasks on multiple lines, without this implying a real enhancement of skills and control of their job.12

The rationality of the technological road can indeed heighten the contradictions regarding management’s stated aim to involve the workforce in company’s problem-solving. Studies on flexible automation in South Africa, and its impact on workplace relationships indicate that automation is generally implemented on a selective, unintegrated and piecemeal basis (Maller and Dwolatski, 1993; Ewert, 1992). This seems still to be largely functional to cost-cutting and labour-saving aims, facilitated by a deeply entrenched managerial authoritarianism (Kraak, 1996). As a result, the import of ‘Japanese’ managerial ideologies and their collectivist view of the firm has generally assumed the form of corporate paternalism as selective worker involvement in suggestion schemes and top-down communication, while at the same time it denied a real delegation of power and responsibility, for fear that this would reinforce militant unions. These attitudes are often adapted to an established, widespread racial imagery, as in the case of a manager at Toyota South Africa who credited the success of Just-in-

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Time in his Durban plant to the fact that Zulu workers share the same work ethics as the Japanese, which did not prevent another manager at the same company from observing that:

Blacks like repetitive tasks. They want to do the same thing over and over. Even if you show them a faster and easier way of doing a job, they want to stick to the old way. The blacks just think it’s a big joke. They are supposed to call for more parts when they have less than ten in their bin. But not these guys. They wait for them to run out altogether, then they raise the alarm. It’s against the rules, but you can’t stop them. They just call a shop steward, stop the line, and then you have a big hassle on your hands (quoted in Nattrass, 1991:pp.3,4, own emphasis).

This combination of innovation in organisation and continuity in authority and managerial culture created a profound suspicion and hostility towards new production philosophies among union themselves:

Workers are rightfully suspicious because they will have to police themselves, put pressure on each other. The first determinant of teamwork is cutting the costs of control. In general there is objection towards these things because it means more works, more load, the elimination of breaks. And the grading system is not based on the recognition of skills. Workers don’t see the rewards.13

The technological road to restructuring has found its most systematic implementation at SAMCOR, a Pretoria-based manufacturer producing vehicles under the Ford, Mazda and Mitsubishi brand name.14 The company is considered the most technologically advanced car manufacturer in the country. It was the first to introduce, in 1987, robots in its body-shops, and then in the paintshop. Its complex, multi-model production outline performs on a highly diversified output, and a product range that, before recent rationalisation moves, used to consist of eleven models and more than one hundred and thirty variants, which made SAMCOR one of the most complex car companies in the world. This also means that SAMCOR workers are required to be extremely flexible, able to switch continuously from one product to another. However, performing multiple tasks amounts in this case neither to skill enhancement nor to recognition and rewards of tacit worker skills and flexibility. In fact, the highly advanced technological framework (which includes robotisation of transfers, automation of the lines and computerisation of quality control) allows, from one side a significant intensification of work, which is responsible for company plans providing for a substantial productivity increase with nearly half the current headcount, to be achieved in a five year period.15 From the other side, technological innovation is specifically designed with the aim of automating and separating from the workers’ intervention all those functions whose performance relies ‘by their very nature’, as a manager said, ‘on the inconsistencies of men’s thought’.

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Therefore, automation was most intense where it could provide for predictability in those segments of production which would otherwise depend on human evaluative and cognitive skills (such as the identification of defects). This form of rationality ‘objectively’ embodied in the technical framework acted as a clear limitation to worker involvement, which was therefore, with few exceptions as in the case of the paintshop, confined to operations which are most menial, repetitive and inherently predictable in output. In this way, high flexibility and advanced automated technology allowed the pursuit of a typically Taylorist aim: to remove the labour process from the vagaries of workers’ discretion, incorporating it in a set of objective and quantifiable indicators that could be easily stored and recalled through a computer network connected to a Flexible Manufacturing System. Technological innovation, therefore, defined a clear-cut divide between the conceptual and cognitive skills reserved to the system’s planning functional operatives, and a ‘worker initiative’ confined to functions deemed as inherently ‘smooth’. In this regard, the predominance of a Taylorist paradigm inside South African experiments with flexible, ‘lean’ production makes NUMSA organizer, Chris Lloyd, reject the concept altogether, preferring to it that of ‘hi-tech Taylorism’.16 The combination of work intensification and thelimitation of workers’ active intervention provides very little ground for workers to develop a sense of participation to the performance of the company in terms of quality enhancement:

When I check the quality of the panel, sometimes I do fight because I think it must not go to the line. I can inspect what the guys are producing and reject the whole stock already built because the weld is not holding. It’s a problem because if the quality is not good the production foreman is going to fight with because I’ll be hampering or disturbing the production process which is designed on what he needs, say five cars. He’s going to fight with you. That is why lean production is not favourable, because you cannot interfere with the production volume. The foreman has a target and he does not care about quality. The workers are concerned about quality; what causes the problem is that they want to produce more. They are not giving time to check on what we are doing.

This kind of complaint is reinforced by the permanence of a tight supervisory hierarchy:

OK, maybe I can spend twenty minutes on each combi, doing my job properly and checking the quality and attending the next one. But if they come and say: ‘Kom! Kom! Let that car pass away!’ You start being confused, the quality is going to be poor and at the end you won’t make twenty. But if you think it’s unfair the only way you can fight is through the quality.

‘Quality’ is then recodified and it becomes, from a managerial ideological imperative, a weapon of worker defence against work intensification and supervisory arbitrariness. This mechanism of self-defence at the same time allows workers to rationalise patterns

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of workplace relations marked by managerial unilateralism and authoritarianism in the implementation of increases in workloads, line speed, and overtime:

Hours per unit are reduced, people are retrenched, the speed of machines is pushed harder, jobs are shifted to people behind. These people are harder and faster, not smarter. They call it lean production. But if you are working in these conditions, how can you expect to contribute to what is done in the department?

In this context, the adoption of worker participation schemes at SAMCOR is largely limited to the promotion of a corporate paternalism as a way to bridge the gap between the objectified, predictable rationality of the technological framework and the widespread sense of worker disaffection, estrangement and alienation. For example, SAMCOR’s management considers teamwork as essentially a way of integrating traditional supervisory tasks inside a fundamentally Fordist factory hierarchy. Teams act therefore, as NUMSA’s Chris Lloyd said, as ‘a disguised form of supervision’. SAMCOR’s teamleaders, who, differently from MBSA, are appointed by management and are not required to possess any specific qualification, define their own role with expressions such as ‘a link in a chain of instructions’, rather than as representatives of semi-autonomous groups. Besides teamworking, the company’s approach to worker participation is reflected in various ad-hoc committees for ‘continuous improvement’. These committees, instructed by management and strictly task-oriented, are dominated by a core of experts and technicians specialised in statistical monitoring methods; production operatives can be co-opted on a temporary, ad-hoc basis to solve specific problems. The paternalist bias of this system is clear in the words of one of the managers charged with its monitoring:

Teamwork is about respecting each other’s dignity, it appeals to individuals to respect other people. An injury to one is an injury to all, the old revolutionary buzzword, Amandla!, power to the people: that’s all teamwork stuff. But, turning it around: ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’, so: if you take off a Monday, you are injuring the man who's here, and by injuring him you are injuring the whole company. Amandla!, power to the people: yes, you are empowered to do various things, to participate in the planning and decision making on how to do the job better, on how not to waste the company’s money.

It is interesting that in this discursive pattern worker slogans are appropriated by management and turned against workers’ quest for increased control of the workplace. The whole issue of initiative and worker involvement is, conversely, narrowed down to ‘not wasting the company’s money’.

The ways in which SAMCOR’s management tries to impose an authoritarian organisational and technological framework to win worker allegiance and identification with the company carries potential ambiguities and contradictions. From one side, this originates, as I have explained, in a widespread resentment and a

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generalised lack of consent, which often translates seeming compliance into a series of well documented acts of resistance (stoppages, go-slow, anti-foreman groups), which are structured by informal networks rather than by union organisation. From another side, managerial unilateralism, generalised worker anxiety and insecurity and attempts to sidestep the union through various channels (top-down teamworking, paternalism, ideological and discursive devices which stress the commonality of interests in the company) substantially undermine NUMSA, even if the union recruits the overwhelming majority of the company’s employees. At the same time, SAMCOR can portray itself as a highly successful and profitable company, with the second biggest market share among domestic producers (Financial Mail, 06.04.1998), the best average productivity increases (Sunday Independent 01.09.1996), and a remarkable export performance, especially in subassemblies (Viljoen, 1996).The process of undermining NUMSA is also facilitated by the union’s involvement, as a crucial COSATU member, in a number of discussions and institutionalised forums for industrial and economic policy-making, whose broad agendas may not reflect workplace developments. In a company like SAMCOR there might well be a particularly urgent feeling that the powerlessness of individuals and groups that have to face a despotic work and production organisation is in sharp contrast to loyalty to the union in macro-level negotiations (Buhlungu, 1996:pp.159-164). Many shop stewards at SAMCOR have noticed a growing distance from the rank-and-file as a consequence of managerial attempts to sidestep NUMSA through workplace consultation. Some of them expressed the need, as a consequence, to ‘get closer to the guys’.

Recent research (Joffe and Lloyd, 1996) indicates a visible trend in the South African auto sector towards ‘company unionism’ and the decentralisation to plant-level bargaining of an increasing number of plant-specific issues. In a company like SAMCOR, where the union presence is already weak and problematic, this can exacerbate intra-union divisions and reinforce informal resistance and organisation networks. Should this create a more unpredictable situation for management, it could also undermine a strong collective organisation without which worker resistance could end up in self-defeat. On the other hand, the mass support enjoyed by NUMSA at SAMCOR does not seem to indicate a worker demand for a co-determinist, participatory outcome to the current union weaknesses. Given the current relations of power, that support rather signals an unfulfilled demand by workers for the union to be able to counter managerial unilateralism in restructuring and to provide an alternative to management-initiated forums.

It is at this point that the two trajectories that I have called ‘inclusionist’ and ‘technological’ show most of their similarities. In fact, as I have shown in the case of participatory experiments at VWSA and MBSA, the existence of such schemes is by no means a guarantee of the future development of a democratic workplace along co-determinist lines. Rather, the strategic and tactical advantages gained by management in an age of liberalisation and global competition allow capital a range of restructuring options and choices, which make the adoption of a more authoritarian solution depend

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on contingent and volatile factors. Rather than relying on the inherent democratising potential of those forums, therefore, the questions seems to be posed for the unions in terms of developing a capacity for conflict and opposition that could limit and constrain capital’s broad range of restructuring options. While an outline of such possible strategies is beyond the scope of this paper, the comparison between the inclusionist and the technological road can now be related to my critique of the co-determination thesis by way of conclusion.

Conclusion – Co-Determination: Prescriptive Strength, Analytical Omissions

This paper has discussed strategies of adjustment at the workplace level in the South African automobile industry in the context of a critical discussion of theories inspired by co-determination. Albeit a real co-determinist framework does not apply in the industry, the two trajectories that I called ‘inclusionist’ and ‘technological’ show important commonalities in the outcomes of worker participation schemes. While the former is potentially open to the development of co-decision making and worker structures of consultation over general workplace restructuring, the viability of such attempts relied on their ability to win a union acceptance that is highly unstable. When this tended to disappear, as a result of intensifying claims from the rank-and-file for increasing control and influence over worker participation schemes, then the bias of these experiments towards sidestepping or coopting the union became more accentuated. Faced with worker responses, these companies have proved to be readily open to switch to the more authoritarian, hierarchical and unilateral practices proper to the technological road.

Co-determinist approaches proved unable in themselves to prevent cooptation and emasculation of union structures, that is to say they failed to protect the strong shopfloor union independence that is one of the crucial features of the concept for its supporters. The inability of the co-determination theory to come to terms with this fundamental shortcoming emphasises the analytical weakness of the concept itself. On the other hand, it seems that the strength of the concept relies mainly on its prescriptive power, as an indication of modes of organisation and collective behaviour which are assumed by the proponents of the theory to be desirable for more general socio-economic outcomes, primarily the search for industrial peace and international competitiveness. However, assuming the strength of a concept from what are considered its desirable outcomes fails to solve the contradictions internal to the concept itself. Moreover, it obscures the need to search for alternatives through which organised labour can address the question of unequal power relationships and the strategic and tactical advantage management has in restructuring during a phase of liberalisation and global integration. Rather, a growing company identification is encouraged on the basis of the purely prescriptive and ideological notion that a successful co-determination system requires

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acceptance by the workforce of rapid technological change, flexible work organization and highly internal mobility ... to ensure the competitive edge and the economic success of the enterprise on which, in the last instance, the realization of the employment guarantee depends (Streeck, 1992:p.164).

Moreover, this notion fails to understand relations between diversity in managerial strategies. Auto companies which followed the technological road have managed to achieve industrial peace and worker compliance (if not open cooperation) to develop highly successful production for domestic and international markets without resorting to co-determinist methods, and enforcing instead a widespread disempowerment, uncertainty and subaltern worker involvement in top-down channels of decision-making. This shows that co-determination in the South African auto industry is merely one of the many strategies that management can adopt along a continuum, rather than embodying a superior productive rationality based on the assumed consent-generating virtues of the system. From this point of view, Gilton Klerck (1998) has persuasively argued that the industrial relations framework outlined by the LRA cannot be assumed as heralding a new era of rational articulation of corporatist centralised bargaining and decentralised co-determinist adjustments. The LRA rather recognised previously existing trends to decentralisation of bargaining, which reflect unstable and uncoordinated adaptations to peculiar labour and product market conditions, to which I would add uneven and unequal relations of power and conflict at local and sector level.

However, what is important to notice here is that while experiments with worker participation and limited co-determination failed, largely around issues of cooptation of shop stewards, companies which ‘successfully’ adopted more authoritarian patterns of workplace relations had to face a persistent, albeit largely tacit and unorganised, worker disaffection, which led to discontent and informal resistance. In other words, while worker participation failed to ‘democratise’ workplaces, worker subjugation encountered clear limits in its inability to create legitimation and consent for the company. The permanence of these forms of resistance constitutes therefore a useful starting point to study possibilities for effective worker responses in a context where ‘democratising’ the workplace essentially seems to require stopping management’s unfettered capacity to unilaterally restructure production, employment and organisation. However, an analysis of these possible patterns of resistance and ways for unions to adapt to them to update and rebuild forms of collective solidarity, which is outside the scope of this paper, is foreclosed by a theoretical framework such as co-determination, that assumes reduction of militancy and company identification as a priori for any viable union strategy.

Finally, it is worth stressing that the fact that the activation of workplace participation schemes is based on a fundamental reassertion of managerial control of social relations in production inside highly asymmetrical power relations makes attempts by unions to ‘engage’ employers through these structures generally doomed to failure. It rather seems that ‘engagement’ for union still means militant shopfloor action as the most

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effective way to halt forms of restructuring imposed in unilinear, authoritarian ways. However, the crucial question of constraining managerial capacity to restructure unilaterally operations, rather than to engage management to identify mutually acceptable compromises, does not deny that unions are fighting a largely defensive battle, where the power of worker organisations is undermined by a sense of precariousness, instability, generalized loss of identity, fragmentation of solidarity. From this point of view, accepting at face value management’s claims of a new orientation and positive attitude towards workplace democracy, worker empowerment and work enhancement, and assuming that all this would usher in a new era of stability, productivity and competitiveness at the point of production, is little more than the uncritical adoption and reproduction of corporate slogans and ideologies as objective discursive boundaries for research.

What in my view emerges from this discussion as a more promising direction for future research is the way in which workplace strategies of resistance are still relevant for a factory working class solidarity that is undoubtedly weakened and fragmented by accelerated restructuring in production and organisation. Collective worker organisation is faced with the challenge to identify contents, structures and languages to bring together multiple strands of contestation that are currently existing in an often covert, informal shape, permanently in danger of self-defeat and isolation. Acknowledgement of conflict and resistance in research on changing forms of work and production allows for the adoption of a problematic, articulated view of organizations. Rather than being assumed as imperfect approximations to some ‘model’, then, they would be restored to their meaning as spaces of struggle and contestation, where counter-offensive to domination constantly modifies established meanings and rules, affecting reciprocal strategies, and defining unpredictable scenarios to provide new spaces of opportunity and power to emancipatory actors and pro-jects.

Notes

1. Many thanks to Bridget Kenny, Gavin Hartford and Eddie Webster for additional materials provided.

2. At the beginning of 1997 COSATU had about 1.9m members, up from 1.2m in 1991. The National Union of Mineworkers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa were at the time the biggest COSATU affiliates (Filita, 1997).

3. An excellent summary of South African debates on workplace restructuring in the broader context of labour market flexibility is provided in Bezuidenhout (1997).

4. For example, at the 1997 Annual Congress of the South African Sociological Association, two sessions were entirely devoted to debating co-determination, as well as the large majority of industrial sociology papers delivered. Out of nine contributions submitted by members of the Sociology of Work Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand (which contributed most industrial sociology papers), seven were on co-determination.

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5. Eddie Webster, personal communication after discussions with Brian Smith, Industrial Relations manager, VWSA 3.10.1996.

6. NUMSA shop stewards interviewed by Eddie Webster, 25.02.1995.

7. NUMSA shop steward committee, MBSA, Proceedings and Developments, n.d. (but 1988) (document supplied by Gavin Hartford); Supreme Court of South Africa, Eastern Cape Division, Case No.738/88, Mercedes-Benz of South Africa Ltd. v National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa and 21 Others, Grahamstown, 26-27.05.1988.

8. Brian Knoesen, Industrial Relations manager, MBSA, interviewed by Eddie Webster, 14.02.1995.

9. Brian Knoesen, Industrial Relations manager, MBSA, interviewed by Eddie Webster, 14.02.1995. See also Mercedes-Benz South Africa (1994).

10. Brian Knoesen, Industrial Relations manager, MBSA, interviewed by Eddie Webster, 3.10.1996.

11. This paragraph draws on interviews conducted with MBSA’s managers and shop stewards by Bridget Kenny and Sabata Nakanyane on 11.07.1997 and by Ian Macun on 16.10.1997.

12. Information gathered from observation during a visit to Nissan-Automakers, Rosslyn, 6.11.1997.

13. Tony Kgobe, NUMSA national co-ordinator for the automobile, tyre and rubber industry, author’s interview, 8.09.1995.

14. Unless otherwise indicated, my findings on SAMCOR are the product of interviews I made during research from March to September 1996 (Barchiesi, 1997 and 1998).

15. Information provided by NUMSA shop stewards.

16. Author’s interview, 15.08.1995.

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Franco Barchiesi Department of Sociology and Sociology of Work Unit, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg South Africa

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