Jim Day
The bar in what used to be the Quirinale Hotel, with its zebra-striped walls and languidly spinning fans, lies quiet and empty. Gone are the hotel’s notorious days of pulsing musical acts that played on the elevated stage, the chance of picking up a prostitute, scoring some coke or rubbing shoulders with agents from some of the old government’s most notorious hit squads.
Today, the former bar hosts monthly meetings of the 11-storey building’s new tenants, where they can talk of leaky faucets or garbage pick-up. In what used to be the Quirinale’s kitchen, workers tap away at wall tiles as part of converting the space into a creche. Tiny toilets that don’t reach your knee await the use of tenants’ children when the creche opens in February.
Hillbrow’s Quirinale Hotel, once the city’s most famous den of vice and intrigue, has been converted into a low-cost housing project for hotel and catering workers. The shift from social blight to what some see as a showcase for responsible social investment is an example of how labour union assets can be utilised in ways other than pouring them into the marketplace.
Last February, the Hospitality Industry Pension Provident Fund (HIPPF), which controls about R120- million in assets from the retirement funds of restaurant and catering workers, purchased the Quirinale to convert it to housing for its members. In July, tenants began moving into the 140 flats of what has been renamed Badiri House (Badiri is the seTswana word for workers). Today, 150 people are on a waiting list to move in, said Allan Kolski Horwitz, who acts as principal officer of HIPPF.
Horwitz, who drives a beat-up reddish car and considers poetry his true calling, began working with hotel and catering workers’ unions in the mid-1980s and later became active in the civic association of Johannesburg. In choosing to utilise a portion of workers’ assets to meet social needs, Horwitz has taken a different path from many of the labour militants of the 1980s, who have enthusiastically entered the world of big business.
He offers Cyril Ramaphosa as an example of the other breed of labour leaders: a man who shot to prominence in 1985 when he led the biggest strike in South African to protect black miners from mass retrenchment on the mines and now says his New African Investment Limited (Nail) corporation will not invest its assets, including a significant chunk of worker savings, in the ailing mining industry because the returns were not likely to be good enough.
“The thrust of unions’ work now is no longer the interests of the workers, but to support the growth of the black business class,” said Horwitz. In the past, a key goal of the unions was to improve the lives of workers, secure jobs and democratise the nation; now, the goal is to maximise returns, he said.
While investors representing unions ranging from the National Union of Mineworkers to Ikhwezi have chosen to invest their assets in media outlets, breweries and a wide range of other businesses, HIPPF has sunk more than R30-million into such projects as Badiri House, a low-interest housing loan programme and Nhlanganani, a project that will eventually see construction of 400 houses for fund members, in the Diepsloot area north of Johannesburg.
Horwitz sees the union’s pension and provident funds, estimated by one analyst at about R50-million, as a great untapped pool for “social investment”.
“If every fund put in just 10% of its assets, we’d be talking about a hell of a lot of money,” said Horwitz. And a hell of a lot of housing.