As jobs are shed at a terrifying rate, it’s time for a national debate on what to do about it
Glenda Daniels
More than half-a-million jobs have been lost in the country over the past six years. Nearly 40 out of every 100 people of working age are unemployed – about 4,5-million people – and each year around 370E000 new job seekers join the labour pool.
Hit left, right and centre by changes in the world economy brought about by globalisation, organised labour is reeling.
The sad truth is that the social and economic cost of globalisation is being borne by the working class and the unemployed, says the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which will decide on May 1 whether to go on a one- day national strike to protest against the job loss situation.
The challenge for organised labour is enormous – to find imaginative ways of changing the situation, and to turn the menace of outsourcing into an advantage.
Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi says we are living in a union-bashing climate where organised labour is being slandered as lazy and selfish and unions have become soft targets.
”We need a national debate on the job loss bloodbath. It’s more than a crisis, it’s a catastrophe, but not enough is being done by government and business about it.
”We are tired of being the scapegoats, and we think that extraordinary measures need to be taken to pull South Africa out of this quagmire,” says Vavi.
”We need to take the debate beyond looking for social security for the unemployed. We need to find ways to stop job losses and create more jobs.”
Labour agrees unemployed and retrenched workers should be absorbed into service and tourism industries. But it is frustrated that while massive public works and housing programmes could be creating jobs in the meantime, that kind of major reconstruction has not happened.
Outsourcing – which has contributed to job losses in formal employment – in Vavi’s view, is equivalent to a replacement of quality jobs with sweatshops, leaving the worker open to exploitation, a loss of benefits, which leads to poverty and an insecure working life.
”For me subcontracting and outsourcing, downsizing and rightsizing are fancy words for spreading misery and poverty. It’s an attack on the living standards of people and unions’ gains are being lost in the process. Workers are already paying dearly for the price of transformation.”
Cosatu is also opposed to a social contract, including wage restraint, if it means that the workers make all the sacrifices. However, if massive job creation is included, a compromise is possible.
Cosatu’s job loss mass action campaign is the first real attempt to wake stakeholders up to the desperation of the situation.
The International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICFTU) covered issues such as social protection, human rights and the world of work, jobs and justice in the global market at its congress in Durban earlier this month.
The issues are clearly universal, but on the short-term agenda in South Africa are amendments to labour legislation to allow for more flexible labour policies – a move favoured by both business and government in the hope that it will attract foreign investment, which will create employment.
Business South Africa wants to go beyond the issue of legislation and talk about uplifting skills, says Vic van Vuuren, the organisation’s markets labour convenor.
It’s a matter of urgency, he says, that the Skills Development Act be implemented. In some countries that have successfully fought unemployment, the nature of the workforce has had to change.
There is a need for discussion on ways to help people start up small businesses. One creative way around job losses is not to retrench completely but rather to employ someone for two days a week and then encourage the ”retrenched” worker to set up his or her own business for the other days of the week. This has worked well in some European countries, for instance Germany, says Van Vuuren.
It is not only business that’s looking to change traditional ways of working. Neva Makgetla, co-ordinator of fiscal monetary public sector policy at Cosatu, points to the South-East Asia labour market force as a good example of how highly skilled workers with lower wages made a difference to the economy and to unemployment. South Africa may need to make this shift too, she says.
”Skills development is the most important factor to develop the economy. South Africa can’t compete at the low end of the market but only the medium and higher ends. And it needs the skills to do this. You don’t get a sense of urgency from government that there is a serious need to address the skills shortage problem.
”The creation of small business is one solution to employment creation, but right now it’s not a worthwhile trade-off as it’s not happening at the rate that it should.”
Magketla says the country needs an industrial developmental strategy to create jobs, sector by sector. There are great opportunities in agriculture and in the service industries – in catering, cleaning, hair salons, flower selling, banking or day care. But in industries such as mining, structural changes in the economy have led to losses.
However, there is a lack of access to information for many unemployed people, who often don’t know where to find jobs, what sectors are labour intensive, how to gain access to training, how to solve their high transport costs to and from work – and they have difficulty accessing quick loans to set up small businesses.
Makgetla points to another, skilfully concealed, problem with managements. Senior and middle managements often don’t know how to implement the new labour laws.
”Often downsizing, in agriculture, for instance, for many employers means that workers now have rights and employers don’t know how to deal with this.
”They haven’t handled the transition well at all. Besides general skills shortage at the lower end, there is a serious skills shortage among managements as well.”
She cites the example of the public service. It is not bloated, she argues – it has already shrunk by 13% over the past four years – but it is under- trained.
The Department of Labour is trying to establish sector education and training authorities (Setas), bodies to promote skills development strategies in an economy divided into 25 sectors. Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana said recently that a work force which acquired new skills would attract foreign investors to South Africa. Our poor track record in human development, he said, has consigned us to the bottom rungs of international competitive ratings.
But the government’s response to the job loss crisis is too slow, says independent economist Dr Pundy Pillay. He feels that while job losses are inevitable because of the opening up of the economy, South Africa is battling to compete at the high end of the market because of a lack of skills and education. Unfortunately, he says, no analysis or proper statistics are available in South Africa about what really is happening with job losses. A further problem is a lack of trainers to encourage multi-skilling.
Outsourcing can indeed become a creative way of employment rather than a stumbling block, he feels. Unions can negotiate with companies on imaginatively re- engaging workers in non-core functions such as cleaning and catering. Workers can be helped to set up such businesses rather than remain retrenched after a function is outsourced.
What needs to be looked at with urgency is why small businesses are not taking off as they should. One obstacle is access to finance, but there are other problems: the extent to which legislation impedes job creation, and the single most important factor, how to increase skills through human resource development.
”What the government can do is prioritise job creation and drive this from the president’s office. South Africa is going nowhere if this doesn’t happen,” Pillay says.