Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane
Labour has drawn up comprehensive proposals for making South Africa’s railway system profitable and efficient, but neither Spoornet nor the government has responded. As a result, about 15000 workers wait to hear if they will lose their jobs, says Karl von Holdt, who is head of the workplace reconstruction unit at the National Labour and Economic Development Institute. The unit is advising labour on restructuring at Spoornet.
Addressing a Sociology of Work Project seminar at the University of the Witwatersrand last week, Von Holdt starkly outlined the crisis facing Spoornet, critiqued government propo-sals for privatising the parastatal and detailed labour’s proposals to keep the company publicly owned while making it profitable and efficient. If the government succeeds in fast- tracking privatisation of Spoornet, thousands of retrenchments will take place and half the rail network will be closed with devastating effects on some communities. Spoornet, which employs 33000 people, suffered a phenomenal loss of R2- billion in 1999. Only 22% of certain freight trains arrive on time and only 40% to 50% leave on time. In its current state of dire inefficiency and poor customer service, the parastatal would need about R1,2-billion to R2-billion of public money every year for the next 15 years. The company is crippled by under-investment and a steady deterioration of infrastructure and rolling stock. Spoornet also faces a crisis of competition from road transport, following the deregulation of road freight and the taxi industry in the 1980s. In addition, South Africa has one of the highest tonnage limits in the world on roads and these are almost never policed and enforced. “The result,” says Von Holdt, “is high cost to the public and the state in the form of damaged roads with expensive maintenance backlogs, traffic congestion and accidents and pollution.” Coupled with these problems is poor business management with an inherited bureaucratic, hierarchal, military-style command structure, according to a Department of Public Enterprises consultant. Spoornet management narrowly focuses on highly profitable lines, with only 100 customers providing an astonishing 96% of Spoornet’s revenue, while 17 000 customers account for 4% of revenue.
Customers using smaller regional and branch lines (such as East London to Umtata) are unserviced or underresourced.
Union cooperation in turning around the crisis is a “Holy Grail”, says Von Holdt. An operational efficiency committee with strong union representation meets weekly with Spoornet management. It drafted a document recently that proposes trade union cooperation in reconstructing Spoornet, that the entity remain public, that it increase its volume rather than close unprofitable lines and that it place a three-year moratorium on retrenchments. Spoornet, a division of Transnet, does not currently fulfil its mission to provide integrated transport solutions. Instead, it bizarrely competes with companies such as Autonet which was established by Transnet.
And “human resource management is hopeless now”, says Von Holdt, citing one Spoornet employee: “We have thousands of supervisors but no supervision.”
If the government’s proposals are intended to eliminate the need for state investment in a national transport system, the examples of privatisation in the United Kingdom and Argentina contradict this, argues Von Holdt. Labour’s proposals for Spoornet could be “a second wave of union strategies for reconstruction”, says Von Holdt, distinguished from the first wave in the 1990s that focused on “technically complex grading and training systems”. This strategy tended to disempower shop stewards and neglect the crucial site of change namely, the workplace.
Responding to Von Holdt, Marina Meyer of the Department of Public Enterprises pointed to the macro-economic context within which restructuring is happening jobless growth, for example.
Labour has begun to mobilise its members in support of the International Transport Federation’s International Railway Workers Action Day on March 29. In South Africa the focus will be opposition to the government’s privatisation plans for Spoornet. The next edition of the South African Labour Bulletin focuses on restructuring Spoornet. It will be available at the end of the month