Des «Villes de classe mondiale pour tous»: les vendeurs ambulants en tant qu'agents de revitalisation syndicale en Afrique du Sud contemporaine

Engaging with recent scholarly debates on the challenges of labour movement revitalization in both the global North and South, this paper examines the street traders’ movement as an agency to re-empower the labour movement, with specific reference to the South African case. The paper explores the mobilization of street traders in Durban/eThekwini, their growing alliance with other marginalized groups – particularly the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo and mainstream unions, and the World Class Cities for All Campaign. This was a joint front by the street traders, community movements and trade unions, which challenged the anti-poor policies associated with preparations for the FIFA 2010 World Cup. It demonstrates how street traders – being both the poorest as well as the most vulnerable fraction of workers, often based in shack communities, facing evictions from the streets (the workplace) and from the shacks (the community) – play a key role in bringing together a range of struggles and movements. It argues that they can and have played a momentous role in reactivating the ‘movement’ character of mainstream unions, and in reconnecting them with other social movements. Accordingly, their struggle can be a promising agency in revitalising a new ‘social movement unionism’ SMU in contemporary South Africa. Finally, the article examines core characteristics of the emergent street traders’ movement, which he calls “the movement of the marginalized labour force”, and seeks to integrate street traders and their unions into the SMU approach. Introduction In recent years labour scholars and activists discussed the need to revitalize the labour movement in both the global North and global South. At the heart of these debates is the question of whether it is possible to move from traditional forms of unionism to a new ‘social movement unionism’ (SMU) that is able to deal with the 82 challenges of the contemporary era more effectively (Turner, Katz and Hurd, 2001; Voss and Sherman, 2000; Waterman, 1993; Webster and Buhlungu, 2004). This is strongly connected to a growing stress on the need to revive unions’ role as “sword of justice” (Hyman, 1999). Given that unions almost universally emerged as social movements (Hyman, 2001), the notion that unions should return to their ‘movement’ roots has been a key part of these debates (von Holdt, 2002; Fairbrother, 2008). The South African labour movement of the late twentieth century was a key inspiration for the development of the SMU idea. “At its inception in 1985 [the] Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) exemplified SMU, where democratically organized workers engaged in both ‘production politics’ at the workplace and the ‘politics of state power’” which “involved explicit alliances with movements and organizations outside the workplace, but under strict conditions of union independence based on shop floor accountability” (Pillay, 2011: 2). COSATU’s subsequent activities helped inspire activists elsewhere to promote SMU-style activism. Yet in contemporary South Africa, many have argued that COSATU’s SMU roots have been weakened partly due to new divisions in the working class with the transition from apartheid to parliamentary democracy, and concomitant processes of eliteformation and workplace restructuring (von Holdt, 2002). While “[n]ew forms of poverty appeared during the ‘Mandela Decade’ [1990-2000]”, the priorities of the ‘new poor’ were often not effectively represented by existing trade unions or community (‘civic’) organizations, and so gave rise instead to either new forms of patronage politics or urban social movements (Sitas, 2010). Given these challenges, union revitalization must mean more than simply strengthening existing union organizations. Present-day SMU is not merely a matter of revitalizing an old repertoire, but rather one of creating new links and engagements with other parts of civil society (Lier and Stokke, 2006). Rather, a return to SMU must mean exploring imaginative and new forms of engagement with the unemployed, the ‘new working poor’ and with the new urban social movements (Webster and Buhlungu, 2004). This recognizes that the decline of SMU in South Africa derives partly from local SMU’s unresolved and long-standing problems in organizing and incorporating “the marginalized labour force” into contemporary unions (Celik, 2010). This suggests that it is the marginalized