Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
Are the South African working classes about to get the kind of leadership they need? Yes, if we are not being misled.
For the signs are there that the leadership of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) may be giving up on bombast in favour of intelligent engagement on the most difficult issue before it, the rest of the labour movement, business, the government and, yes, the millions without jobs.
Late last week, the government took its first – not last – steps towards making it easier for employers to create new jobs. And the top leadership of Cosatu, much the largest of the union federations, after a brief fulmination, has begun to show some good sense.
Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana announced that, from November 15, a number of labour regulations will apply less stringently to small businesses. In the case of businesses with less than 10 employees, the maximum overtime limit will increase to 15 hours a week rather than 10; the rate of pay for overtime will be reduced to time-and-a-third from time-and-a-half; employers and individual employees will be allowed to agree between themselves to average out over the period of up to four months the number of hours worked; and employees will no longer be entitled to three days’ “family responsibility” leave a year.
About half-a-million workers are likely to be affected by the changes.
The words of labour Director General Sipho Pityana were even more interesting. What made his statement intriguing was his past. Pityana has overseen the introduction in recent years of much of the legislation which, alongside other factors, has been blamed for the lack of new job creation in South Africa.
But, on Thursday last week, he was putting forward a different perspective. If I strip his statement of its cosmetic ifs and buts, and read between the lines, his message to the working classes ran something like this:
“My dear comrades, the time for realism has arrived. The market rules, OK. If we are going to survive or prosper as a country – if we are going to create the millions of jobs we need – we have to make it easier for the capitalist scum to make a quick buck on our bent backs. To achieve this we need, among other things, to introduce a lower wage rate for our youth and first-time workers. If you want to know what else needs doing, listen also to comrade Mdladlana today. And later we’ll be introducing further, tougher measures to achieve the necessary.”
Then Pityana ended his message with a slogan not heard before on South African soil. “The power,” he cried, “is theirs.”
Whatever was happening? The government appeared, so to say, to be testing the waters with its toe before grabbing the bull by the horns and biting the bullet on labour market deregulation.
I do not doubt for a moment that the timing owes a lot to President Thabo Mbeki’s office and to the opinions on the matter of Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and his colleague at trade and industry, Alec Erwin.
Then Pityana ended his message with a slogan not heard before on South African soil. ‘The power,’ he cried, ‘is theirs’
Even our live-wire deputy president has been brought in on the act. Jacob Zuma has called for a “tough employment accord” to be signed by May next year between labour and business and, no doubt, by all the other stakeholders, social partners, interested parties, handlangers and hangers-on who consider their signatures crucial to sealing the national purpose.
So that’s the deadline, then, for another Job Summit-style social compact. Again, the power of words to confuse, mislead and say no more than people can bear to hear, but little that they want or intend to do, will be tested almost to the limit. But the drift of policy will be clear to all willing to see: we are moving towards a much less regulated labour market.
If I am right about this train of events and its meaning, then the government has, at last, decided to call the unions’ bluff.
And, what is just as heartening, appearances suggest that Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and his senior comrades have concluded that they have little choice but to sharpen up their act in response. That means not seeking confrontation. It tends to mean the reverse: an intelligent engagement with the government on the kinds of labour market and other reforms that are necessary.
Could it be that the Cosatu leadership is beginning to see that confrontation with the government on these issues would entail leading its members down the kind of cul-de-sac a number of intrepid British trade unionists mapped out for their members in confrontations with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the early and mid-1980s? That cul-de-sac is signposted: Being right, but dead-right.
Vavi’s initial response to the announcements on Thursday last week was “shock”. Mdladlana’s changes, he said, “take away the fruits of many years of struggle by all workers for decent working conditions”. So far, so good.
But I gather that there were soon dark mutterings in the upper echelons of Cosatu about “war” with the government and the labour ministry and department.
Since then, however, the Cosatu leadership has become more emollient. After months of dodging a meeting with Mdladlana to discuss labour market reforms, they sat down to talks with him on Monday.
In a joint statement at the end of the talks, the two sides said they were both “strongly of the view that government’s programme of transforming the apartheid labour market needed to be consolidated and taken forward”.
You can delete the word “apartheid” from that sentence without in any way distorting what the government side meant and what the more perceptive of the union representatives present understood the sentence to mean.