A Tribute to a Fiery Trade Unionist - Nad Murugan

Tribute to Nad Murugan – Militant Trade Unionist – by Marlan Padayachee

SOUTH Africa has lost one of its most fiery and militant trade unionists with outstanding negotiating, mediating and legal skills this week. Nad Murugan, aged 53, died under tragic circumstances in Durban.
For almost a decade he had battled a severe bout of depression and alcoholism, triggered by the brutal murder of his wife by a domestic worker in 1992 and possibly the post-traumatic stress of the apartheid era.
Despite this painful personal tragedy, Murugan stayed the course. After championing the grievances of poorly paid municipal workers in Durban, he relocated to Johannesburg where he excelled as a part-time senior commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration.
But amid his successful professional role-playing, he appeared to be dogged and shadowed by the gruesome death of his teacher-wife Rebecca. She was busy planning a homecoming celebration for her husband, who had completed a year-long course in labour law at Harvard University, when she was bludgeoned to death by her maid at her flat.
Murugan’s year-long scholarship at the famous Ivy League landmark in Boston in the United States of America had prepared him adequately to play a powerful role in the labour movement in a democratic South Africa.
As a white collar professional at the City of Durban in apartheid- era 1980s, Murugan cut his teeth in trade unionism with the Durban Indian Municipal Employees Society, where he rubbed shoulders with the blue collar workers.
As the leader of a small union of street-sweepers and labouring gangs, established at the city’s communal Magazine Barracks by Indian indentured sugar cane labourers, he won many labour issues and staged protest marches and brought the municipality to a standstill in his confrontation with the old city council. He also pitted his talents against the might of the city’s leading corporate labour law firms.
Racial and ethnic politics was anathema to Murugan.
During this watershed period of racial turbulence, Murugan was sucked into the maelstrom of anti-apartheid politics and he nurtured and re-engineered his labour movement into an all-race union, bringing African and coloured workers into a single bargaining unit.
The birth of the powerful South African Municipal Workers Union was to change the face of how municipalities dealt with its workforce and rekindled one man’s passion to ensure that workers enjoyed the fruits of the new nation’s march to workplace equity and economic prosperity, hence the birth of the CCMA.
At the CCMA, he applied his legal mind effectively while using his mediation and arbitration skills to change rigid mindsets of employers while ensuring that aggrieved employees were treated with fairness. He also contributed his intellectual property to many caseworks and publications.
Murugan featured in many landmark hearings, notably settling the issue of allowances and salary increases between Eskom and Numsa and Solidarity trade unions, and disputes involving the South African Revenue Services and the Media Workers Association of South Africa.

Back home recently, family members in Stanger and Durban rallied around Murugan in the aftermath of another personal setback, a divorce from his second wife, Kantha Naidoo and her emigration to Australia.

Then out of the blue came a surprise call from Murugan, brimming with confidence about a new labour of love to pull together a book about the face of trade unionism, labour disputes and the new culture of conciliation, mediation and arbitration and how he viewed labour politics in a transforming South Africa.

A dream deferred, a book in the making, the labour movement is poorer without Nad Murugan.

However, amidst the humdrum of his chequered life and times, Murugan was a great single-parent to his two sons, Denver and Renard, who overcame their own personal battles, challenges and prejudices of their physical impairment and disabilities. Hamba Kahle, Nad Murugan.

Marlan Padayachee is an international freelance journalist who covered the historic political, labour and social frontline battles during the apartheid era.