At a Glance
Durban, Indian South Africa, and the Politics of the Intermediate Position
Jay Naidoo was born in 1954 in Durban, the largest city in Natal and one of the most politically complex environments in apartheid South Africa. Durban was home to the largest Indian community in Africa — the descendants of the indentured labourers brought from India to work the Natal sugar fields in the second half of the nineteenth century and of the traders and professionals who had followed them — and it was the city in which Mahatma Gandhi had spent formative years developing the political methods of nonviolent resistance that he would later deploy in India.
The Indian community of Natal occupied a distinctive and uncomfortable position in the apartheid racial hierarchy. Classified as a racial group distinct from both whites and Africans, Indian South Africans were subject to systematic discrimination — restrictions on residence, on property ownership, on the kinds of businesses they could run, on their access to education and employment — but they were also, in the formal racial calculus of apartheid, positioned above African South Africans in a hierarchy that was designed to divide the oppressed majority against itself. The apartheid state's strategy was to offer each non-white group enough relative advantage over the groups below it in the hierarchy to reduce the incentive for cross-racial solidarity.
The South African Indian Congress represented the tradition that rejected this strategy. The SAIC, rebuilt in the 1940s under the leadership of figures like Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, had committed itself to non-racial politics and to alliance with the ANC and the broader Congress movement — accepting that the liberation of Indian South Africans could not be achieved in isolation from the liberation of the African majority, and that the apartheid state's divide-and-rule strategy needed to be countered with principled solidarity. This tradition was the political inheritance within which Jay Naidoo came of age, and it shaped his understanding of what politics was for and how it needed to be done.
Into the Labour Movement: The New Trade Unionism of the 1970s and 1980s
The South African labour movement of the 1970s and early 1980s was in a period of rapid development and fundamental transformation. The Durban strikes of 1973 — in which African workers had walked out of factories and workplaces across the city in a spontaneous demonstration of collective power that the government and the employers had not anticipated — had shattered the assumption that the African workforce was too divided, too controlled by the pass laws and the migrant labour system, and too fearful of the consequences to act collectively. The strikes demonstrated that African workers could and would organise, and they created the political space within which the new independent trade union movement would develop.
The new unions that emerged from the post-Durban period — independent, non-racial, democratic, shop-floor-based — were different in character from the established unions of the apartheid era. They built their power from the bottom up, creating genuine shop steward structures that gave workers real representation at the workplace level, building branch networks that were organisationally alive rather than administrative shells, and developing the leadership from within the workforce rather than importing it from outside. This was a model of trade unionism that took seriously the idea that workers were not simply the beneficiaries of the union's work but its active creators and democratic controllers.
Jay Naidoo came into this movement and rose through it to become, by the time of COSATU's founding in 1985, the person the federation chose as its general secretary. His appointment reflected both his personal qualities — his energy, his organisational talent, his ability to communicate across the multiple communities that the labour movement needed to hold together — and the confidence of the new trade unionism that it had produced leaders of the quality it needed.
COSATU: Leading the Most Powerful Labour Federation in South African History
When Jay Naidoo became general secretary of COSATU in 1985, he took charge of the most powerful organised labour body South Africa had ever seen — a federation that at its founding represented 450,000 workers and that would grow to represent more than a million. The federation's founding was itself a political act of the first importance: the unification of the major independent unions into a single body gave the labour movement a collective voice and a collective power that dwarfed anything that had previously existed, and it positioned COSATU as an institutional actor that could not be ignored in either the industrial or the political arena.
Naidoo's general secretaryship was defined by the dual character of COSATU's role: it was simultaneously a labour federation pursuing the industrial interests of its member workers and a political force committed to the end of apartheid. He managed this duality with a consistency of vision that was not always easy to maintain against the pressures that the two dimensions of COSATU's work created. Industrial demands required negotiation and compromise and attention to the specific conditions of particular sectors and workplaces. Political demands required solidarity and the subordination of sectional interests to the common goal. The skill with which he held these two dimensions together — insisting that they were not contradictory but complementary, that workers' industrial interests and their political liberation were aspects of a single project — was central to COSATU's effectiveness in this period.
The political strikes and stayaways of the late 1980s were COSATU's most powerful instruments. The two-day national stayaway of May 1987 — called to protest the state of emergency — involved three million workers and was the largest coordinated work stoppage in South African history. It demonstrated the reach and the discipline of COSATU's organisation and showed the apartheid government, in terms it could not ignore, that the labour movement had the capacity to impose massive economic costs on the South African economy. Naidoo was the public face of these actions, the person who called the stayaways and justified them and bore the responsibility for their success or failure.
Negotiating the End of Apartheid
The negotiations that produced the democratic transition of 1994 were a complex and extended process that began in earnest after Nelson Mandela's release in February 1990 and culminated in the April 1994 elections. COSATU was not a formal party to the main constitutional negotiations — those were conducted between the ANC and the National Party government under the CODESA and multi-party negotiating forum frameworks — but the federation's influence on the process was real and important.
COSATU's power — its ability to organise strikes and stayaways that could impose massive economic costs — was one of the levers that the ANC used in its negotiations with the National Party government. When the negotiations stalled or when the government appeared to be dragging its feet, COSATU could respond with industrial action that reminded all parties of the costs of delay. And COSATU's substantive positions on the constitutional and economic framework of the new South Africa — on workers' rights, on the structure of labour relations, on the economic policy the new government should pursue — had to be taken into account by the ANC negotiating team, which was accountable to a constituency that included the federation and its members.
Jay Naidoo was a participant in these processes, both formally and informally. His relationships with the ANC leadership — many of whom had come from the liberation movement's internal structures with which COSATU had been allied — gave him access and influence that he used in the service of ensuring that the labour movement's priorities were reflected in the constitutional and policy framework that emerged from the negotiations.
The RDP: Giving Substance to Liberation
Nelson Mandela's appointment of Jay Naidoo as minister responsible for the Reconstruction and Development Programme in his first government was a recognition of both the labour movement's political contribution to the democratic transition and of Naidoo's personal capacity to drive a complex, ambitious government programme. The RDP was the ANC's flagship policy — its commitment that the formal achievement of political rights would be followed by substantive improvements in the material conditions of the majority of South Africans who had lived under apartheid.
The RDP committed the government to programmes of mass housing construction, electrification of townships and rural areas, provision of clean water, expansion of primary health care, and improvement of the education system. It was an extraordinarily ambitious agenda, and delivering on it required the coordination of multiple government departments, the mobilisation of public resources on a large scale, and the management of relationships with business, with international donors, and with the communities whose lives the programme was supposed to improve. Naidoo brought to this work the same combination of political vision and organisational tenacity that had characterised his leadership of COSATU, and he drove the RDP with an energy that produced real results even in the short time before the programme was absorbed into the government's broader policy framework in 1996.
Legacy: From the Union Hall to the World Stage
Jay Naidoo's career — from trade union organiser to COSATU general secretary to government minister to international advocate — traces one of the characteristic trajectories of the generation that made the South African transition. He came of age in the apartheid era, built his public life in the labour movement and the liberation struggle, navigated the transition to democracy with his political commitments intact, and then carried those commitments into the international arena in the decades that followed.
His legacy within South Africa is the contribution he made to building COSATU into the institution it became during the 1980s and to ensuring that the labour movement's voice was heard in the negotiations that produced the democratic constitution. The constitutional provisions for workers' rights, the labour relations framework that governs employment in South Africa today, and the initial commitment to social and economic transformation represented by the RDP all bear the traces of the work that Naidoo and the labour movement did in the transition period.
His legacy in the international arena is the continued articulation, across different platforms and in different contexts, of the analysis he developed in the South African labour movement: that the fundamental conditions of human life are political questions that require political solutions, that organised collective action remains the most powerful lever for changing those conditions, and that the global inequalities that the post-apartheid world has not resolved are as urgent a challenge as the racial inequalities of apartheid South Africa were for his generation. The directness with which he makes these arguments, and the grounding they have in a lifetime of experience rather than in abstract theory, is the quality that makes his voice worth hearing.