Howard Barrell : Over a Barrel
One of our stranger habits as South Africans is to imagine the rest of the world owes us a living. It is not a feeling many readily admit to. It is more an underlying conviction which governs much of our political and economic behaviour.
We did once represent a moral crisis for the world. But the days of legislative apartheid are past. And we make a mistake if we imagine that the international significance we had before 1990 has, since then, somehow been translated into comparable economic and political importance.
It has not. We are small fry. And we will remain insignificant for at least several decades. Moreover, if we continue to assume the world owes us a living, we can expect to remain insignificant for a great deal longer – and to become much poorer in the process.
There may well be some great ledger in the sky which shows that we are the world’s moral creditor. But, even if there is and the rest of the world accepts its moral arithmetic, we are likely to face insuperable difficulties in getting anyone with real money to cough up. The notion that the world is in our debt is not, therefore, something we should waste more time on.
But we do. The labour strikes of the past three months are examples – particularly current industrial action in the motor industry and plans to call strikes to try to reverse government plans to privatise concerns like Eskom. Let us assume that the union leaders planning these strikes believe these actions will improve workers’ wages and conditions. If, in the current international economic climate, they believe this, they are being stupid beyond belief.
The world is facing the worst economic crisis since 1929, possibly of the century. Our currency has lost a third of its value over the past year. This has sharply cut the profits remitted abroad to companies which have long owned subsidiaries in South Africa. It has reduced the attraction of having investments here.
Emerging markets like South Africa are now among the least attractive cross-border investment risks. The confidence of South African consumers and businesspeople has plummeted, meaning domestic investment and consumer spending is likely to fall further.
Crippling interest rates are driving local businesses, particularly smaller ones so important to job-creation, to the wall, and our unemployment rate looks set to rise sharply above its already dangerously high rate of 30%. And, tellingly, sales of some makes of locally assembled cars fell by about a fifth between July and August alone this year.
This is the time to go out on strike? For higher wages and better working conditions, which will add to the costs of investors and employers? In the auto and motor industries? Anywhere?
Anyone who answers “yes” must believe the world owes us a living: that people will/should/ must invest here even if it brings them little or no profit and hassles with employment equity law, industrial relations legislation and crime.
It is madness for South African workers – who are relatively underskilled, underproductive and overpaid – to be striking now. The challenge before a trade union in an economic crisis is to help its members maintain their jobs at all costs – even to consider volunteering wage cuts to protect existing employment levels as companies’ revenues decline.
A serious national strategy to meet the current crisis might involve all the main players in identifying what goods the world wants to buy, which of them we can produce competitively here, and then getting on with it. It would entail accepting that we are unlikely to be able to do this alone; we will need foreign investment and technology transfers on a large scale. And this would involve convincing foreign investors that we are a country in which they can expect to make a return on their capital which nullifies the perceived risk of being here.
Danie Joubert, a competition consultant based in Johannesburg, suggested to me this week: “We don’t need a jobs summit. We need an export summit. That’s the way to approach the problem. The solution to South Africa’s economic development lies outside our borders.”
To give an aggressive, outward-looking strategy half a chance of success will also involve getting rid of ridiculously protective labour legislation – which one corporate leader referred to this week as “a new wave, best-in-the-world, Rolls-Royce labour law producing new wave, best-in-the- world Rolls Royce chaos”.
This legislation and some unions’ current behaviour are – regardless of whether some of us like the ideological implications of this truth – massively damaging the prospects for creating jobs and maintaining those we have.
Members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, and some others in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), would do well to ask themselves who is now leading them into the swamp, with what motives, and whether they or this country can afford such leaders.
But what if the union leaders do not hold the crazy view that industrial action now is going to improve their members’ pay and conditions? What if these union leaders have another, distinctly political motive?
What if, shortly after President Nelson Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki read the riot act to the Cosatu and South African Communist Party congresses earlier this year, selected communists and unionists decided to use a series of strikes to send a message to the African National Congress leadership; that people like Mbeki should not even dream about attempting to assert real ANC ascendancy within the tripartite alliance; that Mbeki should understand that Cosatu and the SACP provide the spine of the ANC’s political and electoral organisation?
I gather this is not an unlikely explanation. I am not the only one hearing the knives being sharpened in the ANC, the SACP and Cosatu. If this does provide a more accurate explanation for much of the recent strike activity, some strong political action awaits us – perhaps before, but more likely after, the election.
When the ANC leadership tames Cosatu and the SACP or, failing that, breaks up the alliance, we will be at one of the great turning points in South African political history.
It may also come to be another kind of watershed – a moment when the majority of us throw out foolish, indefensible convictions like the one that suggests the world, capitalists or anyone else owes us a living.
“People can remain stupid,” according to a friend of mine, “for an awfully long time – until their stupidity is defeated, not by some superior argument, but by their own self-interest no longer being able to sustain it.”