The stark truth is this: even though the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) may rally millions on to the streets, its national strikes no longer stop the economy.
And so it was this week. Life went on; most workers went to work; the shops opened, largely staffed by casual workers who generally do not belong to trade unions.
The trains and buses ran, and where they didn’t, the unorganised and entrepreneurial taxi-driving class easily picked up the slack.
The strike did not have the crippling effect of the height of Azikhwelwa, the Eighties and Nineties stayaways that stopped the country in its tracks and made Cosatu and other union federations the forces they are.
It is a moment that bears scrutiny for it reveals in one day a number of vital trends: the union movement is no longer the power it used to be; and the labour market has already been fundamentally reshaped.
Casual labour is growing (figures suggest one in five workers is no longer a full-time worker) suggesting that the labour market is more flexi-ble than the African National Congress bosses realise.
This weekend, the ANC meets in its national general council where it will debate a proposal to create a dual labour market, with less regulation (or protection, depending on where you stand) for young workers and for those employed in small businesses.
The challenge of decent jobs goes much deeper than the solutions set up in the ruling party’s policy proposals.
The labour laws are only a small aspect of the system that is not working and any discussion on jobs must deal with the country’s skills deficit, a business sector unwilling to spend its investment capital and a civil service unable to stimulate the economy by actually spending all the moolah in the public purse.
For unions, the challenge is not only one of organising more vigorously, but to engage unemployment in a more nuanced fashion. Jobs are no longer only about wages; they are about skills. That is why unions should be making noises not only about the rand but also about the soon-to-be enacted immigration regulations, which do little to entice, say, a skilled dentist who will in turn create jobs for a dental assistant and a receptionist.
The guiding light at this weekend’s discussions should be that there are no sacred cows (or laws). If the bargaining system is a disincentive to job creation, let’s look at it. If the labour laws are too fanciful and expensive to administer, let’s look at them.
There are ways of ensuring that workers are treated decently without the intricate and costly systems set up by our laws. The choice is not as stark as the unions would have us believe: between the status quo or the sweat-shop.
Both are dead ends.
Gun for hire
You could almost hear the sigh of disappointment that went out across the country when Willem Heath announced he would be joining Jacob Zuma’s defence team.
We don’t know much about crusading judges in this country: the inquisi-torial magistrate on a mission is a figure from the Romance legal systems of France, Spain and Italy. But when Heath was head of the special investigating unit, we took rather quickly to the idea of an anti-corruption paladin, with the power to cancel contracts and bring the mighty to heel.
Patricia de Lille took her famous dossier to him, and defence contractor Richard Young, who says he was unfairly squeezed out of a contract to supply information management systems to the navy’s new corvettes, painted a picture for Heath of the generally corrupt relationships behind the deal.
But they are only the most vocal. Several other people with compromising information, and a good deal to fear, trusted him with sensitive documents. Would they have done so if they had known that he would later be providing legal advice to one of the central players in the drama? Heath knows who sang, and why, and he will be able to provide his client with extraordinary insight into the background to his plight.
Why is he doing this, at what is surely considerable risk to his reputation?
Among his other clients are Brett and Roger Kebble, who believe they were the victims of a campaign of slander by Bulelani Ngcuka. They are leading proponents of the line Heath is now retailing — that Zuma is the target of a political conspiracy. Did they ask him to enter the lists? Or is he still smarting at his exclusion by President Thabo Mbeki from the arms deal investigation, and looking for a way to hit back?
Perhaps he is just an advocate, scratching around for work, but it is impossible to avoid the impression of dire conflicts of interest, or to avoid the sense that an early hero of the war against corruption is now a gun for hire.
The Democratic Alliance, which likes to represent itself as the last bulwark against corruption, is complaining loudly about all this, even as it appoints to a senior job Erik Marais, the man who broke foreign exchange laws to ease donations from German fraudster Jurgen Harksen into party coffers.
“He’s very capable, he’s a nice person, and I like him,” was the explanation from Western Cape leader Theuns Botha.
The Harksen affair was just a grubby, regional scandal, and the fallout from the arms deal is testing the limits of our democracy, but they offer some lessons in common: hypocrisy in public life is bottomless, and we should look to robust institutions to safeguard the principles of the Constitution, not individuals.