Let’s be grown-up about this — South Africans should not condone or romanticise the violence of striking security guards or the mayhem unleashed during other recent labour disputes. It is not a case of heroic class struggle or justified worker counter-violence against repressive capitalist bosses and their state lackeys. Workers now have a government they chose, and a worker-friendly labour dispensation that facilitates the peaceful settlement of disputes. It is significant that in the week in which security strikers ran amok in the Johannesburg city centre, commuters trashed a bus depot in Mpumalanga after their buses were impounded as unroadworthy. The venting of collective frustrations on private property is a bad habit inherited from the bad old days, which union leaders should do all in their power to discourage.
That said, it is important to understand why this strike has turned nasty while others have not — both sides can draw lessons. Security is a low-skill, low-wage industry where workers lack the same power to inflict economic damage on employers by withdrawing their labour as those, say, in automobile assembly or mining. It is a highly militarised sector where guards are desentitised to violence by their training and daily experience. And although one cannot generalise, it is a sector where many employers have an apartheid police or defence force background, and where claims of poor and racially contemptuous treatment of workers continue to abound.
But perhaps the key drivers of the violence are the duration of the strike and its fragmented character. There is a simple equation between the length of a strike and the risk of violence. As the personal cost rises for workers, their anger and desperation grow to white heat — witness the fallout from the British mine strike of the 1980s. The pay dispute in the security industry has dragged on for a staggering six months, and sporadic strike action for almost four weeks.
Much of the violence has been directed at strike-breakers and this, in turn, flows from the fragmentation of the sector, with no fewer than 33 unions and no formal bargaining forum. The Congress of South African Trade Unions is committed to organising vulnerable workers and forging one union per industry — it clearly has much work to do. But employers, too, are to blame. They stand accused of favouring splinter organisations and trying to conclude a pay deal that excluded the Cosatu affiliate, the biggest union in the sector.
Strikes are a normal feature of democratic societies, but they need to be institutionalised if they are to be peaceful. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is in the long-term interests of security bosses to encourage a strong and stable labour movement in their industry.
A green tax code
For too long we’ve deluded ourselves into believing we are richly endowed with plenty of space, sun and minerals and that sustainability isn’t really an issue for our tip of Africa.
So we’re big on extraction; digging deeper holes. We have huge coal reserves and plenty of energy. We consume big and worry little about conservation.
In fact we are highly inefficient energy consumers and produce twice the waste per person than our developing economy peers.
We have done little to encourage alternative technologies, which, in the case of solar power, for instance, could make use of our abundant sunshine. But there are signs that the party is over. Water is an increasingly scarce resource. Electricity, particularly in recent times, has been even scarcer. Ask any Capetonian.
The government, the Treasury in particular, has produced a report that is both welcome and disturbing on the impact of taxes on the environment.
The report is welcome because it is the first comprehensive attempt to understand how the tax regime impacts on the environment and how taxes may be better used to achieve more sustainable outcomes.
It is a welcome overhaul and should not provoke a right-wing caterwaul. Right now, the tax code encourages environmental destruction. Take, for example, the zero rating of VAT on pesticides and fertilizers in a country where 2,5-million hectares suffer from acidification.
There are no incentives to discourage waste. We do penalise high water consumption, but only for residences, which consume only 10% of the total. Business and agriculture can use water as though there is no tomorrow. The report also bares high, sometimes hidden, environmental costs. Transport, for instance, has an annual environmental cost of between R34-billion and R55-billion.
We may have cheap electricity but associated environmental costs are anywhere between R4-billion and R30-billion a year.
The Treasury’s idea is that taxes can help shape behaviour to achieve more desirable, and sustainable, outcomes.
The report can be seen as yet another attempt by the government to shake more money out of business and the consumer, but the tone of the report suggests otherwise. It sees that increased revenues from fossil fuels, for instance, can result in lower taxes on labour.
Citizens rarely welcome new costs, but this is a tax for tomorrow.