Date: 10/03/2012

Source: The Congress of South African Trade Unions

Title: Cosatu: Vavi: Address by the general secretary, at the SACTWU national bargaining conference, Cape Town

National Office Bearers of SACTWU
Members of the National Executive Committee
Leaders and activists of the union at all levels
Delegates to this Bargaining Conference
Dear Comrades

You have always been one of COSATU’s most loyal and militant affiliates. From the days of Solly Sachs to the time of Violet Seboni, SACTWU and its predecessors have been staunch fighters for workers’ rights to a decent wage, safe and healthy working conditions and fair and equal treatment.
I always have to point out that SACTWU has also always been a pace-setter in promoting your members’ wider interests - providing bursaries for higher education for members and dependants, organising a <http://www.sactwu.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=58> Worker Health Programme Service that provides confidential counselling and testing for members and their dependants. <http://www.sactwu.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61&Itemid=64>
Comrades
Most of you here today and, I am sure, most of your members took to the streets on Wednesday to fight the scourge of labour brokering – modern-day slavery, which I shall return to.

But, as we said in our memorandum, the strike was not just about two specific issues but part of a war we are waging to defend the working class from a further assault on its living standards.

Despite the political and social gains scored since 1994, the working class in this country continues to suffer from the legacy of apartheid and colonialism and the effects of neoliberalism. Poverty, unemployment and inequality are the three principal challenges that the working class still faces.

We recognise of course the major advances our country has registered under the ANC government – laws to protect workers’ rights and civil liberties and the delivery of basic services, which has meant millions having access to housing, water, electricity, education and healthcare, etc.
However, most of these gains have been undermined by the slow pace of transformation in the economy, the rampant commodification pursued through privatisation and other neo liberalism programmes including the user-pay principle, and the theft and misappropriation of the people’s money through corruption.
Income inequality in South Africa is now the highest in the world. Half of our population survives on 8% of national income while the other half enjoys 92%. In 2007 approximately 71% of African female-headed households earned less than R800 a month and 59% of these in fact had no income at all, while 58% of African male-headed households earned less than R800 with 48% with no income.
The poorest 10% of the population share R1, 1 billion whilst the richest 10% share R381 billion. Our country is trapped in a developmental paradigm that has simply reproduced these conditions for 18 years now.
One of the foremost indicators of the inequality characterising or society is unemployment, which by the more accurate expanded definition unemployment is currently at 35.4%. And it toodiscriminates according to race, gender and geographical location. The educational profile of the unemployed reflects that over 60% of the unemployed have not completed matric level education.
But it is not only the unemployed who live in poverty. The numbers in the swelling ranks of the working poor keep growing. The rate of exploitation of labour is increasing and business is raking even more profits than ever.
It is worth repeating what I said at the COSATU 25th anniversary celebration in December 2010. At that time the legal minimum rate for qualified clothing machinist in non-metro areas such as Newcastle, Botshabelo and Qwaqwa was R479 per week.
“The employers of small and big companies,” I said, “continue to make mega profits. Their life of opulence explains our life of misery. For many hours and often in sweatshop conditions we put in hard work to meet impossible targets our bosses impose on us.”
How dare these super-rich CEOs and their lackeys in the DA, the universities and the media, lecture us on ‘excessive’ wage demands. I am sure you will agree at this conference that any increase at or below the rate of inflation will leave our members no better off and will actually increase the wealth gap. 5% of your bosses’ pay is far more than 5% of SACTWU members’ wages!
Comrades
Alongside the massive levels of unemployment, is a continuing shift from permanent tocasual, insecure and temporary employment. That is what we were marching about on Wednesday.
Atypical forms of employment have increased tremendously with 30% of the work force being casualised. Labour brokers are the main drivers of this process. Their practices are the absolute contradiction to the principle ofdecent work. They have driven down workers’ wages and conditions of employment. They do not create any jobs but sponge off the labour of others and replacesecure jobs with temporary and casual forms of employment.
The National Association of Bargaining Councils suggests that there are 979, 539 labour broker workers in the country, significantly larger than suggested thus far.
Whilst most workers under Labour Brokers take home a pittance as a salary, their bosses reward themselves with millions.
The ‘client companies’ who use these labour brokers justify this by referring to our ‘inflexible’ labour laws and the burdens imposed by collective bargaining. They like labour broking so much because it relieves them of the responsibility to respect workers’ human rights, pay them a living wage, treat them decently and comply with the labour laws.
They use the threat of outsourcing jobs to labour brokers to blackmail workers, with the argument that if you don’t want to work for what we are offering, there are thousands of others out there desperate for a job at any price.
Trade unions can never submit to this kind of blackmail by employers who seek to exploit the desperation of the unemployed. I must remind you of your statement at your 2010 that “a new growth path for decent work in the industry cannot be based on slave wages and certainly not on a deliberate and disrespectful disregard for our country’s labour laws”.

That is why we have held to firmly to the principle of ‘equal pay for work of equal value’, a principle in international conventions to which our government is a signatory. That is why we continue to oppose the idea of a youth wage subsidy, which is purely designed to make it cheaper for employers to employ young workers by paying them a subsidy from the tax-payers, with nothing to stop them retrenching an equal number of older workers who do not qualify for a subsidy
That is also why all COSATU members have taken a keen interest in your agreement last year which would seem to contradict some of these principles.
The 2011 November CEC discussed this agreement, which provided for a different minimum wage for first-time workers, and pressure by employers in other sectors for the introduction of similar provisions in bargaining agreements.
The meeting decided to postpone the finalization of this discussion but it was agreed that the final response will be guided by the following framework:
COSATU remains committed to closing the apartheid wage gap, a decent minimum wage for all workers, and in particular addressing the crisis of youth unemployment.
COSATU is committed to finding creative solutions to these challenges, but does not believe that lowering workers wages, when most workers earn below R3000, i.e. below the household subsistence level, can be part of the solution.
No country in the world has succeeded in addressing these challenges through embarking on ‘a race to the bottom’, which sees lower and lower wages as the solution to the challenge of rising unemployment and declining living standards.
In Brazil there has been a virtuous cycle of growing real wages, growing employment and declining inequality, driven by the rising real demand resulting from rising living standards and an appropriate industrial and macroeconomic strategy, to ensure the sustainability of this developmental cycle.
The crisis of unemployment in South Africa similarly requires sustainable solutions, not crisis management, or knee-jerk measures which deepen the problems. The CEC therefore agreed on the need for a multi-pronged strategy, a combination of macro-economic responses to promote industrial renewal and diversification, and a well resourced and focused industrial strategy. Collective bargaining agreements can help to advance this developmental agenda.
Social partners at Nedlac have agreed that youth unemployment is a crisis needing urgent attention. Consensus is emerging that a coherent response is required to address this challenge, and that measures such as the proposed youth wage subsidy cannot be a silver bullet to effectively address this challenge.
The CEC has therefore set up a team to address these multiple challenges and look at proposals to be placed before the next CEC and synchronised with discussions in Nedlac. The role of collective bargaining and government tax incentives will only be two of a wide range of policy interventions to be considered by the CEC in addressing these matters.
Comrades

Our government has committed itself to prioritise decent work. As we heard in both the recent State of the Nation and Budget speeches, the creation of decent jobs is the top priority for government and labour.
That is why we have welcomed the President’s bold plans to develop our infrastructure which will both create jobs directly and lay the foundations for a modern, manufacturing-based economy.
The main reason why we have failed to create jobs is not ‘excessive’ wages and ‘inflexible’ labour laws, but our failure to escape from an economic structure which we inherited from the days of colonialism and apartheid of an over-dependence on the export of raw materials, like gold, platinum, iron ore, coal and diamonds.
That is why we so much welcome the government’s commitment to the beneficiation of our raw materials, so that instead of exporting them, we employ workers to turn them into manufacturedproducts.
We have been working with government and business through Nedlac to take forward the roll-out the National Growth Path and the Industrial policy Action Plan, particularly those aspects of which can be implemented quickly, such as finding ways to use unemployed workers to improve service delivery to our communities.

We have signed accords with government and business on basic education, skills development, the green economy and local procurement and will be working hard to use these accords to improve the lives of workers and the poor.

We are encouraged by the government’s commitment to policies agreed at COP17 to clear a pathway to a legally binding instrument that will compel all countries, including the biggest polluters, to take action to slow the pace of global warming, a new commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, the launch of the Green Climate Fund, and the implementation of the agreements on global warming made in Cancun, Mexico in 2010.

We have welcomed the decision to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change - one that includes both rich developed countries like the US as well as developing giants such as China and India - to be decided on not later than 2015 and to come into force by 2020.

Meanwhile we shall be engaging with government to convince them we will never come near to creating five million new jobs if we continue with the Treasury’s cautious and conservative fiscal and monetary policies.

Comrades

I must take this opportunity to dispel media reports, most recently in yesterday’s Mail & Guardian, of divisions within COSATU and its affiliates. There is not a word of truth in any of these reports. Indeed Wednesday’s mass marches were the crushing proof that our federation has never been more united.

Every affiliate issued statements of support for the action and our demands on the two issues – labour brokering and e-tolling – and the leaders of every affiliate were speaking on our platforms up and down the country.

Within the alliance, while it is true that COSATU has at times been critical of the ANC government on certain policy issues, but these comments have never been personal attacks but in line with our six-point policy commitment to be supportive, but when necessary critical of the ANC and government.
We have consistently analysed the roll-out of the ANC’s Polokwane policies, and at times have been critical at the slow pace of implementation, but we have also always acknowledged progress, particularly recently on such issues as the infrastructure development and job-creation plans and the introduction of the NHI, which may well have been partly as a result of COSATU’s pressure.

There are no pro- or anti- Zuma factions within the federation, as the article alleges. COSATU has taken a firm decision not to discuss the ANC leadership issue and has indeed not discussed whether it will or will not support anybody. We remain fully committed to our alliance with the ANC and SACP.
 

Finally Comrades
I cannot sit down without paying tribute to one of your former leaders, whom we have honoured in our magnificent new head office building - Violet Seboni. She was a fine heroine of the trade union and liberation movement, who committed her entire life to fighting for her fellow workers. I hope that her example will continue to inspire you as you confront the many challenges your union faces over the coming days.
Viva SACTWU Viva!