Agreement on the Growth and Development Summit went to the wire on Thursday as business, labour and the government tried to put the final touches to a pact binding them to a set of measures to kick-start growth and employment.
Deadlines to get the final document to the printers were missed and missed again as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) pushed to strengthen the agreement, while business held out against provisions like domestic procurement, which it viewed as too restrictive.
The big-ticket agreements are likely to include: a pledge by business to target 5% of investment to development and job-creating projects; targets for the number of young learners companies should hire; and the number of jobs in public works the government should provide.
Until the eve of the summit, labour tried to exert pressure on the government to twist business’s arm into making a numerical commitment and financial contribution to both job creation and skills development. They were locked in talks until the Mail & Guardian went to print on Thursday afternoon.
How a public works programme would be set up and administered remains unresolved. Business is understood to have offered managerial expertise to oversee a much-expanded programme. Sources argued this week that the existing “community-based” system had failed to provide more than about 15 000 jobs a year, underlining the government’s inability to run a scheme 10 or 20 times as large.
The importance of a fresh approach to joblessness has been highlighted by official statistics suggesting the economy is on the cusp of recession. Last week’s growth figures showed gross domestic product growth had slowed to 1,5% in the last quarter and there are indications of a downturn in manufacturing.
The government’s unofficial target is to reduce joblessness from 29% to 12% in the medium term.
Talks were tough, but “we did not approach a crisis at any point in the talks”, a senior negotiator said.
It looked like a crisis was brewing on Monday when the spectre was raised of Cosatu effectively pulling out of the summit by not signing the final declaration, the summit’s showpiece. By Thursday afternoon, the federation was still dragging its feet.
A senior alliance leader said on Thursday that labour would still decide on Friday whether it should endorse the document even after it had been printed.
At a special executive committee meeting on Wednesday, Cosatu’s top guns agreed in principle to sign the agreement, apparently worrying they would appear “obstructionist”. Officials rejected the “spoiler” tag. “There is nothing in it [the agreement] that makes it a revolutionary document. But we can make it a stronger document, and that was our purpose,” said a Cosatu unionist.
The Cosatu meeting was followed by a frantic meeting of the tripartite alliance secretariat, which continued until late Wednesday. The labour federation, along with the South African Communist Party, tried to get the ruling alliance partner, the African National Congress, to intervene.
The left believed the alliance should have entered the summit process with a unified stand, in terms of an earlier agreement at the alliance’s pow-wow in Ekurhuleni late last year.
The dispute is old. The ANC-allied trade unionists and communists believe they should have more authority over government policy, notably macroeconomic policy. ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe explained the process had been moved to the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) to enable the government to participate in the process, which would help labour extract commitments from it.
The first alliance-driven process was plagued with problems. The alliance committees failed to meet for several months and labour insiders blamed Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin for not making themselves available for meetings.
The government and business pushed to confine the summit negotiations to four areas to secure tangible agreements: investment, jobs, equity and skills, and local solutions. Cosatu bridled at being corralled in this way.
“It’s not just about the numbers. To create jobs, the economy must be restructured,” said a union official. This required discussion of industrial strategy and other aspects of the macroeconomy such as monetary and fiscal policy.
Labour also negotiated to the end to stem job losses, particularly in the public sector.
Until Thursday, the parties were still disputing a clause committing the government to retain parastatal jobs in line with Nedlac’s social plan agreement.
Nedlac executive director Phillip Dexter said “summit cynics” — those who questioned the ability of meetings to spur growth — did not recognise the value of talking. The summit was receiving all the attention, but it was the follow-up that was vital, he said.