It's winter in South Africa, and along with the recent novelty of snow comes something more familiar: strikes by unionised workers.
Monday marked the start of industrial action whose effects Grahamstonians feel most — the municipal workers’ strike. Their South African Workers’ Union (Samwu) has vowed not to return to work unless they get an 18% raise.
It's winter in South Africa, and along with the recent novelty of snow comes something more familiar: strikes by unionised workers.
Monday marked the start of industrial action whose effects Grahamstonians feel most — the municipal workers’ strike. Their South African Workers’ Union (Samwu) has vowed not to return to work unless they get an 18% raise.
The South African Local Government Association (Salga) has offered a raise of just over 6%. Is it just me, or does it seem like it’s only a few months ago when the same workers overturned waste bins and beat up people during a similar strike?
Actually, it was in 2009, but bad memories do linger. Moreover, while strike action is one of the more enduring manifestations of the struggle against Apartheid, it’s also slowly choking the life out of SA’s labour market.
Just this week, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan suggested that we may have to change the way we view labour dispensation, after he announced that the economy had lost another 130,000 jobs in the six months up to June. This has brought official unemployment to 25.7% (a seven-year high).
Unofficially, we all know that there are many more South Africans (as much as 40%) have no job. What is worse, many are often unemployable because they lack basic skills for work in any sector.
Capital and Labour disagree on how we got here. Employers blame the country’s rigid labour legislation which makes it nigh impossible to fire unproductive workers
The same laws unfairly favour inefficient wage increments and collective bargaining processes that lead to incessant strikes, employers complain.
And that’s why many private companies would rather sit with unfilled posts rather than risk filling them with potential ‘trouble-makers’. On the other hand, unions blame employers for serving out “slave wages” in their pursuit of profit at all costs; and on unfair trade practices (and smuggling) that make some imports considerably cheaper than home-made products.
For the record, South Africa WILL NOT win the race to the bottom against China or any other similarly-placed economy. Many have tried and failed. The simple truth is that a bale of cotton evolves into a shirt more cheaply in China than in South Africa. Those are the unfortunate wages of globalisation. South Africa lost the battle (and essentially the war) the day it signed onto the bandwagon of global finance and trade. In that jungle, China is the undisputed king. Ask the Americans, and the Europeans and the Japanese. They have all lost jobs as companies find it cheaper to export labour to a Chinese workforce that might not be as well-trained, but is more docile and costs much less.
Our problems are exacerbated by incredible labour inefficiency (strikes, absenteeism, fraudulent “sick leave”, and sheer incompetence).
And to imagine that there are some who think that SA should sit with so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), who all have larger populations, more skilled workers and natural resources as well as much larger GDPs (Gross Domestic Product) than South Africa.
The country has even losing out to other African countries in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), with Angola, Algeria, Nigeria and economies in Eastern Africa (particularly The DR Congo and South Sudan) the preferred destination.
The view of those who have been watching the Wal-Mart-Massmart saga (in which government allowed the takeover, and then turned around to challenge it) is that SA is not open for business.
Ironically, those who are most militant about keeping jobs in industries where South Africa has no competitive advantage are also the biggest beneficiaries of cheap foreign imports. Which is just as well; because if it was left to each municipality, they could conceivably import the Chinese to do a better job of what SAMWU calls “slavery”.
Sim challenges the reader to guess which Grahamstown store imports almost its entire stock from China without being Chinese-owned.
