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Page context: Home > Transport International Magazine > Issue 24 July 2006 > TI interview

Joseph Katende

Newly appointed ITF deputy regional secretary for AfricA, Joseph Katende, Reflects on his journey in trade unionism to date, and explains why he has great hopes for the labour movement in his region

Stepping into the labour limelight

It was 1976 and I was 17 – a student just completing my training as a motor vehicle technician. I got summer work in the government bus company, and while I was there I raised some questions about pay. That put me in the limelight.

There was a minimum that was supposed to be paid to technicians, but we weren’t being paid it. So I quickly mobilised other workers to ask for a special scale. We agreed at the tea break to go to the personnel manager’s office, but then they all ran away and I found myself alone.

I was put off by the personnel manager and then by the chief engineer. So I decided to insist on seeing the managing director. Eventually I was allowed to meet him, and I presented my case. A week later he called me and said, “Look, I don’t want to give this scale to everybody. Since you have come alone, I agree to give it just to you.”

When my salary envelope came it was very fat. And everybody said, where did this fellow get all this money from? I laughed at them and walked away. But one man came running to me and said, “What did you do to get this?”

I said to him, “I told these people to come together and we would go, to fight together. But I can’t help you now because you have betrayed your own struggle.” So they went off and strategised quickly to make me shop steward!

As soon as I was elected, I went to the chief shop steward and I said this issue must be put on the negotiating table. And that’s how it all began.

Real freedom to defend workers

After I completed my course I came back to the same company, and I ended up working there for 14 years. I rose through the ranks in my job, and at the same time I was rising in the union.

In 1990 I became regional bus manager for western Uganda, but I had already been elected national treasurer for the union. The company told me to resign from the union. I said, “I will not resign,” and in fact it was around this time that the national centre in Uganda elected me to represent workers in the industrial court.

But by now I was starting to feel uncomfortable. My union was becoming very weak. The general secretary had left, and the acting general secretary was not that strong. The executive asked me if I would like to try for general secretary.

At that time I was highly paid, and the general secretary’s salary was very small. But I said, I will come. I was excited. I saw that by becoming general secretary I would be a free man to defend workers.

My family thought I had gone mad. In Africa when you have a good job, it is not yours alone. They led a family delegation to my house to ask me, are you sure? But eventually they supported me.

We had lost members from about 2400 to only 600 in a period of about six months due to retrenchment. The situation was really bad. After I was elected, I drew up a new strategy and brought in new full-time organisers. I also went out myself in our family car to do union recruitment and organising, because the situation was really bad.

Winning new members: urgent measures

The Uganda Transport Company (UTC), the People’s Transport Company (PTC), and Uganda Airlines – all these state companies were reorganising and getting rid of workers. In fact they reorganised these companies to death – UTC, PTC and Uganda Airlines, none of them exists any more.

The bus companies’ work was taken over by small private companies, many belonging to high-ranking officials in the government. Some of them knew nothing about transport.

It was extremely difficult. On top of recruiting I had the trouble of trying to get benefits for the retrenched workers. But one of the things I did was to look in transport allied companies where our members had got new jobs. I followed them where they went and recruited them back into the union. I told them not to lose heart, but to work with us. And I also went to new sectors, like security, and to the informal sector.

As the companies were reorganised, they were outsourcing key functions like catering, ground handling, and security. I got the members back, but the battle was enormous.

From 1993 we began negotiating for the first agreements. It took three years and the employers resisted, but finally we got those first agreements signed in 1996. By then we had raised our membership back to around 1600.

Education, international experience and the ITF

In 1997 the British High Commission invited me to meet the ambassador and explain the labour situation in my country. Following our discussion the ambassador asked me which university I had been to. I told him I have never seen the inside of a university. They said, “Then how do you know all this?”

I told him, “I take my trade union training very seriously”. In fact much of my training was through the ITF. I first got to know the ITF in 1978, when I attended a seminar in Kampala on the roles and functions of shop stewards, organised by the ITF and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Until then I didn’t know there was such a powerful international organisation for trade unions. I kept in close touch ever since and many times over the years I have consulted the ITF.

The British High Commission recommended me for a scholarship at Ruskin College, Oxford, and the union executive gave me study leave from my post as general secretary, so I went to the UK in 1997-8, while my deputies carried on the work efficiently.

Within two months of completing my degree, the Commission contacted me again to tell me I had been exceptionally approved to take the prestigious British Chevening Scholarship for an MA in industrial relations at Warwick University.

When I went back to Uganda my job was still there and I resumed my work. But in 2000 the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions requested that I do some urgent capacity building work for some of the unions in southern Africa.

As I was completing it, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) advertised a job in Kampala, sponsored by the US department of labour, to coordinate a capacity building project for the social partners. I took the job, but throughout my time at the ILO I maintained my contact with the ITF and my union, as a trustee.

A vision for Africa

Now that I am deputy African regional secretary, I would like to dedicate my efforts to helping the African trade unions to reach their full potential. I would like ITF affiliates to be identifiable wherever they are. I want everybody who comes across a worker who is a member of an ITF affiliate to know it. This can only be achieved if these unions impact positively on people’s lives.

I want these unions to become really prominent members of the ITF family, in terms of what they can do for the members. I want to see them become more sustainable economically. I would like to see unions that have some money to spend on their members.

In the absence of democracy, it is very unlikely you can have powerful unions, it is unlikely you can have peace within the unions. So I would like to give priority to building democracy, to organising, education and the building of international solidarity.

I want problems anywhere in the world to be handled with the support of Africa. So if the problem is in Caracas, I want the workers in Caracas to know that the workers in Africa are paying attention. I want to feel that family togetherness in the ITF.

My “elder brother” Roxy Udogwu (ITF Africa regional secretary) has done such a great job in Africa. He has been working without a deputy, but he has built the ITF in Africa. I’d like to see what contribution I can make to ensure that the good work he has done can be continued, so that his dream of a free African transport worker can be achieved.

ITF Congress 2006: the organising challenge

I would like to see Congress – as the first Congress ever to be held on African soil, and given the theme Organising Globally – to focus sharply on building international solidarity through intensifying organisation in the most difficult areas.

Organising is extremely difficult in Africa today, because democracy has eluded us for some time. Countries in Africa are making an effort to democratise, but they are finding it difficult and so are the unions that are trying to give workers a voice.

The thinking of many African governments is that trade unions create rigidity in the economy. Many have adopted indirect deregulation, where rules are on the shelves but they are not being enforced. Many workers are still sacked for trying to unionise. I would like this Congress to look at those special difficulties in organising, starting with Africa.

We need international solidarity to ask the critical questions, to ensure that workers are free to unionise and bargain collectively.

That’s when true democracy will trickle down. We cannot talk of democracy anywhere unless it is in the workplace – because this is where workers spend the most active part of the day. If there is no democracy in the workplace, forget talking about democracy in the country.

It is an enormous task but it is a vision we can achieve together, and I know the affiliates will see what needs to be done.

Interview by Kay Parris.

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Issue 24 July 2006

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