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Angola National Union of Angolan Workers
The UNTA was organized in 1960 in the Belgian Congo
(presentday Zaire) to assist refugees and exiled MPLA members in
their
efforts to maintain social contacts and find jobs.
Managing the
UNTA became more difficult after independence. The UNTA
headquarters was transferred to Luanda, where the shortage
of
skilled workers and personnel for management and training
programs
became immediately evident. UNTA leaders worked to
transform the
group from an adjunct to a national liberation army to a
state
labor union, but encouraged by the "people's power"
movement, many
workers thought the MPLA victory entitled them to assume
control of
their workplace. UNTA leaders found that workers' rights
were
sometimes given a lower priority than workers'
obligations, and at
times industrial workers found themselves at odds with
both the
government and their own union leadership. These tensions
were
exacerbated by the demands of militant workers who favored
more
sweeping nationalization programs than those undertaken by
the
government; some workers opposed any compensation of
foreign
owners.
During the early 1980s, Cuban advisers were assigned to
bring
industrial workers into the MPLA-PT. With their Angolan
counterparts in the UNTA, Cuban shop stewards and union
officials
undertook educational programs in technical and management
training, labor discipline and productivity, and socialist
economics. Their overall goal was to impart a sense of
worker
participation in the management of the state economy--a
difficult
task in an environment characterized by warfare and
economic
crisis. By late 1988, the Cubans had achieved mixed
success. Some
of the UNTA's 600,000 members looked forward to the
prosperity they
hoped to achieve through MPLA-PT policies; many others
felt their
links to the government did little to improve their
standard of
living, and they were relatively uncommitted to the
construction of
a socialist state. UNTA officers did not aggressively
represent
worker interests when they conflicted with those of the
party, and
the fear of labor unrest became part of Angola's political
context.
Data as of February 1989
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