Patrick Craven crossfire
Thami Mazwai proudly proclaims that he and his staff “are gleefully contravening the [Basic Conditions of Employment] Act” by not paying premiums for Sunday working (“Cosatu acts irresponsibly in criticising the government”, September 1 to 7). In other words he is breaking the law. Yet he accuses Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi of “recklessness and radicalism” for campaigning to uphold the laws of the land that protect workers’ rights!
Mazwai complains that his company’s staff are “poached all around” by bigger companies. It is hardly surprising they are willing to be poached, given how he admits to treating them. He concedes that “there are blood-sucking employers with scant regard to blacks as human beings and who live in the past, exploiting and oppressing labour”.
Sadly, they do not just live in the past but in the present. But of course none of them admit to being blood-sucking exploiters and oppressors: they use exactly the same pathetic, sanctimonious excuses as Mazwai – that the low wages and poor conditions are really in the workers’ best interests: “If we were to leave ourselves at the mercy of Cosatu’s hysterical demands, we would soon be out of business” and “36 families will have no livelihood”. Mazwai claims that employers “do not hold anybody to ransom”. But is it not holding workers to ransom if you tell them they have to accept worse conditions or else their jobs will disappear? You think you have the right to exploit your workers because you are doing them such a big favour by employing at all? Cosatu totally rejects the argument put forward by Mazwai, his friends in the media and government ministers, that we must be “realistic” and accept that “there is no alternative” to free-market, neo-liberal, capitalist policies that force workers to accept lower pay, bad conditions and insecure jobs. Firstly, it is unacceptable in principle that workers should have to accept a policy that lets market forces push their wages down to the lowest possible levels in order to make their employers’ businesses more “competitive” on the local or world market. Secondly, it is a policy that clearly does not work. Mazwai talks about “scrapping hard-won rights that hinder economic growth and the creation of jobs”. But there is no evidence that labour laws which protect workers’ rights are an important reason for the low level of investment and job creation.
And if there are some employers who stage “strikes of capital” because workers are relatively well-paid and protected, then Cosatu will never bow down to their blackmail and accept worse conditions. We do not want jobs at any price but quality jobs at a living wage. Cosatu is not “blind to the issues and the facts” nor “slaves to dogma” but sober realists who can see all too clearly the “fact” that the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, which is inspired by the ideas that Mazwai defends, has not worked. It has created neither growth, employment nor redistribution. On the contrary, more jobs have been lost. Since this strategy was adopted, on average more than 100E000 jobs a year have disappeared. Growth and redevelopment have been at a snail’s pace and South Africa remains the second most unequal nation on Earth.
The same has happened in other developing countries which have adopted Mazwai’s favoured policy. Cutting wages and working conditions does not create or save jobs, or help the unemployed. On the contrary it hits directly those unemployed who depend on income from employed relatives and indirectly it hits the whole economy by restricting demand for the goods and services produced by other workers. And the profits made from the exploitation of the workers in countries that have adopted these policies have not been ploughed back into development. They have gone into the pockets of the shareholders of the multinational corporations, based mainly in the wealthy First World. Cosatu will proudly continue to fight for the protection and indeed improvement of workers’ rights and living standards and campaign for economic policies that create jobs and eradicate poverty. The urgency of the jobs crisis demands that the government abandon its reliance solely on market forces, return to the Reconstruction and Development Programme and implement it vigorously to redress the inequalities and injustices inherited from the apartheid years which still haunt us today.
Pat Craven is the editor of the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s magazine, The Shopsteward