The clothing sector is sometimes called the rag trade. Rags and riches may be more apt. If you work, for instance, as a machinist in the rag trade in a KwaZulu-Natal area such as Newcastle, you can expect to earn a union-sanctioned wage of just R228 a week. The same industry, though, paid R10-million to Edcon chief executive Steve Ross last year, nearly 1 000 times that of the machinist’s annual wages.
In a move that signals a new approach to the labour market, the Department of Labour is declining to issue a certificate of representivity to the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry. The agreement governing the clothing industry expired on June 30.
The focus always falls on the disparities between the salary packages of chief executives and the lowest-paid workers, but the era of black economic empowerment deals reveals much larger gaps between the top names and the broad base of shareholders.
Anyone with a bit of spare dosh is driving them. They’re the ultimate status symbol, representing wealth and style. And they shout — loudly — stuff the poor.
CINEMA: Stanley Peskin LEGENDS of the Fall has the look and feel of a film made=20 in the 1950s. Its emotionally overwrought style, replete=20 with biblical echoes, is resonant of Elia Kazan’s self- important adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden=20 (1955) in its treatment of sibling rivalries and love.=20 Most of the characters have […]
The Nats unveil their much ballyhooed ‘Five Year Plan’ … but it signals no great changes.