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Ferial Haffajee
THE government’s determination to keep the lid on the public sector wage bill took a drubbing this week when four trade unions announced a month of mass action.
Ironically, the fight is not with old-guard civil servants, but with the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ affiliates, whose members are the police, nurses, teachers and others who keep the engine rooms of the state running. This involves up to 318 000 workers, among them 40 000 nurses, 48 000 police and prison officers and 150 000 teachers.
The wage protest is, like the fight over social welfare cuts, an example of the fall-out from the belt-tightening to which the country has committed itself via the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy. But government negotiator Dr Neva Seidman-Makgetla says: “There has been a budget cut in real terms but our employees are still being offered inflation-based increases.”
This week, members of the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) kicked off their wage protest with a march to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s door.
Nehawu members will stage one-hour-long protests at their workplaces every day. Police, who are members of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union, are planning lunchtime pickets around the country. The labour action at hospitals, police stations, pension offices and the like could mean longer queues and more delays from an already tardy civil service. Police and nurses are deemed to provide essential services and may not strike, though they can protest, and police could also call an overtime ban.
Four trade unions have declared a dispute with the government on this year’s wage offer. They claim that the government committed itself to an inflation-beating increase for three years in a labour pact signed last year – that’s 9,5% based on the current inflation rate.
The trade unions claim that the government’s offer amounts to a 7,5% increase on average. It all seems to depends on how one calculates what the government is doing with the R6,5-billion it has budgeted for increases this year.
For its part, the government says its offer works out to an average 9%, with higher increases for those in the lower grades.
Nehawu’s negotiator Vusi Nhlapo claims the three-year agreement signed last year would have cost R11,2-billion if the government had stuck to it. “The agreement is not Gear-friendly. If the government wanted to commit to Gear, it should not have signed,” says Nhlapo. Seidman-Makgetla contests this.
She says the unions’ initial wish-list was costed at that amount while in the end, only R6,5-billion was set aside from the public purse.
Government representatives see little chance of finding the additional R2,3- billion that the four unions’ demands will cost. Instead, it faces the costly reality of a public service that has not shrunk by the numbers expected. Attempts to change the service are cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. It will take years before real change trickles through.
The public service was built on a reservoir of cheap and unskilled labour with expensive technocrats on top. This is reflected in the wage gap, where a director general earns about 20 times more than a cleaner. About 21% of the civil service earns less than R1 500 a month. That’s why Nehawu’s pushing hard for a minimum wage of R2 100, while the government is offering R1 750. Many long-serving police officers, teachers and nurses earn only marginally more than the minimum.
Yet it is this constituency who are at the frontline of the health, anti-crime, education and pension services the government must start to speed up.
Simon Geyer of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) claims the government has collapsed a promised performance-related bonus and the annual increase into one. “That would amount to an offer of about 4%,” she says. Sadtu’s 150 000 members are already angry and uncertain, with curriculum changes, redeployment and bigger classes taking their toll.
The increased offer was like putting a match to a tinderbox, says Geyer. Sadtu is not talking protests – yet. Its members, though, will be back at school in time for the nationwide protest planned by the four unions for the 25July and the two-day strike in August.
Promotions which would have brought higher wages have, in the main, not happened.
Eight in 10 general assistants who comprise the lower ranks like assistant nurses, cleaners and kitchen staff saw their titles change but little else. “Promotions are not being made fairly or not being made at all as far as we can tell,” concedes Seidman- Makgetla.