Date: 17/07/2003
Source: Department of Labour
Title: Mdladlana: UCT Graduate School of Business
ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF LABOUR, MMS MDLADLANA, TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, University of Cape Town, 17 July 2003
PARTNERSHIPS FOR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Professor Segal
Members of the Faculty
Students of the Business School
Ladies and Gentlemen
Colleagues and Comrades
First, I should like to thank you for the invitation to be with you today. The theme of this talk is working in partnerships. An essential ingredient of any partnership is dialogue and the understanding of different perspectives and views. As has been said, my first profession was teaching. The core of a teacher's job is about communication and fostering ideas and imagination. So it is good to return to a teaching and learning environment.
In thanking Professor Nick Segal for his invitation I should like to note that a company he helped to establish in the UK - with the improbable title of Segal, Quince and Wicksteed - celebrated its 20th anniversary last month. I make this observation to show that the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was not always correct when he said that 'those who can do, and those who can't teach'. It is good to have a person who started a successful company in charge of a business school!
Previous speakers at similar occasions at the Graduate Business School have addressed a variety of issues and topics. But a common thread has been our national transformation in the context of a new economic world order. They have spoken about the challenges of globalisation within our particular national agenda. I have chosen as my topic the concept of partnerships for growth and development - and the need for our society to build, not only a common purpose and vision, but also a shared commitment to action and implementation.
The concept of partnership was prominent at the Growth and Development Summit held on 7 June. The Agreement reached by government, business, labour and the community at this Summit includes a commitment to build an enduring and lasting partnership between Government and the other social partners to tackle unemployment, poverty and the challenges of social development and economic growth.
But why is the concept of partnership so important and significant?
The agreement reached by the social partners at the Growth and Development Summit is a long and detailed document. But the Agreement identifies four priority areas or themes that must be addressed if we are to achieve sustained growth. These are:
* First, to generate more and better jobs and achieve our commitment to the ILO's vision of decent work for all. This work includes the development of sector strategies, giving priority to labour intensive economic clusters such as agriculture and agro-processing, tourism and cultural industries and to implement a range of public works programmes and to support the growth of cooperatives;
* Second, to win greater and more sustained investment in the economy, from domestic investors and to improve the conditions for foreign direct investment. Inter alia it was agreed that the social partners should investigate ways to raise to five percent that part of the investment incomes of public and private trusts, pension and provident schemes and the like, which can be directed towards job creating ventures;
* The third priority is to advance equity, develop skills, and expand economic opportunities and strengthen the floor of social services available to all, but especially to those living in poverty. The Summit secured a commitment from all social partners to increase the numbers of unemployed people in learnership programmes to 72,000 by May 2004. It also saw a series of agreements in which social partners bound themselves to work with government towards strengthening black economic empowerment and employment equity;
* The final priority is to concentrate on implementation and local action. As the President said at the Summit: It is important that the Summit (the process leading up to it and the Summit itself) is not only a talk-shop, but secures the active involvement of the social partners to tackle the urgent challenges that they have identified. With this injunction in mind, the Summit focussed on the identification of specific programmes, interventions and targets linked to concrete programmes and resources.
The Growth and Development Summit involved social partners working together to analyse and understand issues and to identify the constraints to growth and strategies to eradicate unemployment and poverty. It also involved social partners arguing about, discussing and eventually agreeing a shared agenda for future actions.
This is partnership working in action. It is recognition that Government alone cannot address the endemic economic and social problems that it inherited in 1994 or address the challenges of social development and economic growth on its own. It needs to work with employers, with labour and with the wider community. It is also recognition that by working together, by the public and private sectors planning joint interventions, we are likely to make the biggest impact in the shortest time. It is also recognition that the problems and the challenges of the country are not just the Government's. They affect us all and must be shared by all.
The concept of partnership has been part of the global development and economic management agenda for more than a decade. The United Nations has argued for partnerships as the key to greater efficiency and sustainability of social development. The notion of partnership is central to the work of the International Labour Organisation and is a pillar of its philosophy and organisation. Of course government has a special role to play in these partnerships - to establish the ground rules and framework for action. The private sector brings its resources and expertise, and the labour movement ensures that the proceeds from growth and development are more equitably shared and more humanely achieved. In South Africa the community constituency also plays a vital role - providing the poor with a voice in all levels of decision making thereby ensuring that the solutions are acceptable and provide fair access to those without resources.
Some may suggest that the concept of partnership is so vague as to be useless. However, I believe this is a jaundiced view - just think of the mobilising power of the idea - consider the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002 - in which the very notion of partnerships was described by one commentator as the crucial issue for that meeting.
In practice partnership is a 'suitcase' term. There are many forms and varieties of partnership at work. A partnership can be based on a contract or on a relationship forged from a set of common objectives. Partnerships can be short or long-term, tactical or strategic. The government's alliance with the SACP and COSATU is an example of a partnership which is both long term and strategic, whilst others of its relationships are more tactical and short-term (and I will leave you to fill in the examples). However, the role of government in any partnership is of necessity of a special type, as its authority is based on a democratic, electoral mandate and it has a duty to serve the broader society and not simply a narrow sectional interest.
In terms of the partnership working that our Growth and Development Summit seeks to generate and encourage there are, I suggest, a number of principles that should characterise this working relationship.
The first is that an effective partnership must be based on social dialogue. Social dialogue is key because without communication no relationship can develop. I know that there are those who argue that this is an arduous and time-consuming process and should be by-passed by government. But this is not the way. I understand that talking can be frustrating - but the time spent is an investment - and I firmly believe that it saves time in the long run - dealing as it does with misunderstanding, mistrust and maverick tendencies on all sides.
A by-product of social dialogue is trust- however conditional. This is a second feature of successful partnerships. By trust I mean a commitment to shared action to achieve agreed goals - even if they are short-term in the first instance. Trust is not a given and cannot be taken for granted - especially in a country like South Africa where coercion was used to secure dominance of the many by the few for so long. No, it has to be pieced together over time; it has to be earned - as people work together and share the fruits of their efforts together.
Indeed, the third principle of good partnerships is that they must be goal-orientated and results driven. Progress towards meeting shared and agreed objectives must be measurable. This is important because partnerships should not be vague or sentimental relationships. They are established for a purpose and this must be clear. The engagement of the private sector is more likely to endure if goals are defined and progress measured. It is the approach that I have adopted in the partnership between the Department of Labour and the 25 Sector Education and Training Authorities. It is a partnership based on agreed and measurable targets and performance outcomes and is helping us to stretch the performance of all actors.
The fourth quality of an effective partnership, I suggest, is that each partner gains from it. The benefits may be derived in terms of outcomes or results, in the learning value of taking part in a new way of working, or in the exposure to a fresh set of challenges and solutions for the common good. If the benefits of partnership are too unequally shared, the partnership will not survive very long! But in South Africa there is an element of redress in all progressive partnerships - redress that must permit that group in our society who were unfairly discriminated against in the past to 'catch up' with those who were privileged. Without this element I suggest to you that any partnership we would try to construct would be unstable and unequal!
The role and contribution of partners, and the expectations that other members of the partnership expect of them must be clear from the start. This is my fifth criterion for an effective partnership. Whilst working relationships should guarantee that all partners can contribute to debate and discussion, not all partnerships will be based on equality when it comes to decision making. As we have just discussed, equality is not necessarily the starting point of a partnership. Understanding the ground rules is, however, it is vital that members of a partnership understand not only their roles and responsibilities but also the comparative advantage that each brings to the working relationship.
I believe that partnership working will be an increasing feature of our national life. I have suggested some criteria to characterise effective partnerships. If this way of working is to succeed and bring improvements to the delivery of services and programmes, all will need to bend a little toward the common good:
Within government there is a need to strengthen the collaboration between government departments at national level as well as between spheres of government. Our President has given the lead in this regard by creating working clusters at both Cabinet and Director General level. Now the challenge before us is to see these partnerships translate into meaningful Integrated Development Plans at local level - which translate into improvements in the lives of our people.
The shift for employers is no less challenging. In a recent international study business leaders were asked if profits, the 'bottom line' should be their principal goal and yardstick of success, or if other stakeholders and values should be taken into account. Ninety-six per cent of Japanese managers agreed that profits were not the be-all and end-all of business; 86 per cent of German managers and 78 per cent of UK managers took the same view. What do you think the percentage in South Africa would be? If I look at the Growth and Development Summit agreement I am confident that our employers would score high - after all, their commitment to investment, collaboration in job creation, sharing skills, promoting equity and actively participating in local ventures can hardly be inspired by profit generation only.
The US company Johnson and Johnson famed for its household and medicinal products, adopted some 40 years ago the following as its business credo:
Service to customers comes first
Service to employees and management comes second
Service to the community comes third
Service to shareholders comes last.
Food for thought - but clearly this is a company that believes that the environment in which it functions is one determinant of its business success. A more equitable and inclusive society here must be right for business - and more than anything I believe it is this that has motivated South African business to enter the agreements of the GDS. It does not take a genius to observe that if the broader environment is unstable and volatile - returns on investment will not take long to follow suit!
For workers and community members, there are many challenges but chief amongst them is the challenge of managing the expectations for rapid change amongst their membership. Sadly, the scale of the problems inherited from the past cannot be reversed overnight. And although great advances have been made - in housing, in water delivery, in health, in worker rights and education to name but a few - for those who are poor, the pace of improvement in the quality of their lives will never be fast enough. The labour and community leaders have the great task of working with other constituencies to accelerate the pace of change but without breaking the partnership completely. It is credit to them that they have managed so well, thus far.
In his concluding address at the Growth and Development Summit in June the President said: The simple message of this Growth and Development Summit therefore is: more has to be done by all of us. Working together as partners is one way to ensure greater synergy to focus all our efforts to build on the progress that we have made since 1994. The continuing challenges - of stimulating growth, job generation, skills development and the reduction of unemployment and poverty - are real and urgent.
I think at the heart of social dialogue and partnership is a commitment to social peace, justice and prosperity. And in this regard I am reminded of the words of the great leader and teacher Mohlomi, of the Bakoena and a distant relation of the great king Moshoeshoe, who is reported to have said in about 1720, "It is better to thrash the corn than to sharpen the spear." And I am reminded too of the words of the great king himself who is reported to have often said: "Peace is the mother of nations". Surely a philosophy which is now being taken forward in NEPAD and which infused the GDS agreement?
Of course no one is talking about peace at any price, our fight against apartheid is evidence enough of that - but a peace that values equity, fairness and human dignity and yet at the same time strives to see South Africa as a country on the move with 'a market that is the first choice for investors; with a productive and skilled economy underpinned by modern management; a society with opportunities for all, that recognises people as its greatest asset and has no poverty'. Such was the vision adopted by the social partners at the Growth and Development Summit and which unites the parties to our evolving people's compact.
I thank you.
Source: Department of Labour (http://www.labour.gov.za)
Source: Department of Labour
Title: Mdladlana: UCT Graduate School of Business
ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF LABOUR, MMS MDLADLANA, TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, University of Cape Town, 17 July 2003
PARTNERSHIPS FOR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Professor Segal
Members of the Faculty
Students of the Business School
Ladies and Gentlemen
Colleagues and Comrades
First, I should like to thank you for the invitation to be with you today. The theme of this talk is working in partnerships. An essential ingredient of any partnership is dialogue and the understanding of different perspectives and views. As has been said, my first profession was teaching. The core of a teacher's job is about communication and fostering ideas and imagination. So it is good to return to a teaching and learning environment.
In thanking Professor Nick Segal for his invitation I should like to note that a company he helped to establish in the UK - with the improbable title of Segal, Quince and Wicksteed - celebrated its 20th anniversary last month. I make this observation to show that the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was not always correct when he said that 'those who can do, and those who can't teach'. It is good to have a person who started a successful company in charge of a business school!
Previous speakers at similar occasions at the Graduate Business School have addressed a variety of issues and topics. But a common thread has been our national transformation in the context of a new economic world order. They have spoken about the challenges of globalisation within our particular national agenda. I have chosen as my topic the concept of partnerships for growth and development - and the need for our society to build, not only a common purpose and vision, but also a shared commitment to action and implementation.
The concept of partnership was prominent at the Growth and Development Summit held on 7 June. The Agreement reached by government, business, labour and the community at this Summit includes a commitment to build an enduring and lasting partnership between Government and the other social partners to tackle unemployment, poverty and the challenges of social development and economic growth.
But why is the concept of partnership so important and significant?
The agreement reached by the social partners at the Growth and Development Summit is a long and detailed document. But the Agreement identifies four priority areas or themes that must be addressed if we are to achieve sustained growth. These are:
* First, to generate more and better jobs and achieve our commitment to the ILO's vision of decent work for all. This work includes the development of sector strategies, giving priority to labour intensive economic clusters such as agriculture and agro-processing, tourism and cultural industries and to implement a range of public works programmes and to support the growth of cooperatives;
* Second, to win greater and more sustained investment in the economy, from domestic investors and to improve the conditions for foreign direct investment. Inter alia it was agreed that the social partners should investigate ways to raise to five percent that part of the investment incomes of public and private trusts, pension and provident schemes and the like, which can be directed towards job creating ventures;
* The third priority is to advance equity, develop skills, and expand economic opportunities and strengthen the floor of social services available to all, but especially to those living in poverty. The Summit secured a commitment from all social partners to increase the numbers of unemployed people in learnership programmes to 72,000 by May 2004. It also saw a series of agreements in which social partners bound themselves to work with government towards strengthening black economic empowerment and employment equity;
* The final priority is to concentrate on implementation and local action. As the President said at the Summit: It is important that the Summit (the process leading up to it and the Summit itself) is not only a talk-shop, but secures the active involvement of the social partners to tackle the urgent challenges that they have identified. With this injunction in mind, the Summit focussed on the identification of specific programmes, interventions and targets linked to concrete programmes and resources.
The Growth and Development Summit involved social partners working together to analyse and understand issues and to identify the constraints to growth and strategies to eradicate unemployment and poverty. It also involved social partners arguing about, discussing and eventually agreeing a shared agenda for future actions.
This is partnership working in action. It is recognition that Government alone cannot address the endemic economic and social problems that it inherited in 1994 or address the challenges of social development and economic growth on its own. It needs to work with employers, with labour and with the wider community. It is also recognition that by working together, by the public and private sectors planning joint interventions, we are likely to make the biggest impact in the shortest time. It is also recognition that the problems and the challenges of the country are not just the Government's. They affect us all and must be shared by all.
The concept of partnership has been part of the global development and economic management agenda for more than a decade. The United Nations has argued for partnerships as the key to greater efficiency and sustainability of social development. The notion of partnership is central to the work of the International Labour Organisation and is a pillar of its philosophy and organisation. Of course government has a special role to play in these partnerships - to establish the ground rules and framework for action. The private sector brings its resources and expertise, and the labour movement ensures that the proceeds from growth and development are more equitably shared and more humanely achieved. In South Africa the community constituency also plays a vital role - providing the poor with a voice in all levels of decision making thereby ensuring that the solutions are acceptable and provide fair access to those without resources.
Some may suggest that the concept of partnership is so vague as to be useless. However, I believe this is a jaundiced view - just think of the mobilising power of the idea - consider the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002 - in which the very notion of partnerships was described by one commentator as the crucial issue for that meeting.
In practice partnership is a 'suitcase' term. There are many forms and varieties of partnership at work. A partnership can be based on a contract or on a relationship forged from a set of common objectives. Partnerships can be short or long-term, tactical or strategic. The government's alliance with the SACP and COSATU is an example of a partnership which is both long term and strategic, whilst others of its relationships are more tactical and short-term (and I will leave you to fill in the examples). However, the role of government in any partnership is of necessity of a special type, as its authority is based on a democratic, electoral mandate and it has a duty to serve the broader society and not simply a narrow sectional interest.
In terms of the partnership working that our Growth and Development Summit seeks to generate and encourage there are, I suggest, a number of principles that should characterise this working relationship.
The first is that an effective partnership must be based on social dialogue. Social dialogue is key because without communication no relationship can develop. I know that there are those who argue that this is an arduous and time-consuming process and should be by-passed by government. But this is not the way. I understand that talking can be frustrating - but the time spent is an investment - and I firmly believe that it saves time in the long run - dealing as it does with misunderstanding, mistrust and maverick tendencies on all sides.
A by-product of social dialogue is trust- however conditional. This is a second feature of successful partnerships. By trust I mean a commitment to shared action to achieve agreed goals - even if they are short-term in the first instance. Trust is not a given and cannot be taken for granted - especially in a country like South Africa where coercion was used to secure dominance of the many by the few for so long. No, it has to be pieced together over time; it has to be earned - as people work together and share the fruits of their efforts together.
Indeed, the third principle of good partnerships is that they must be goal-orientated and results driven. Progress towards meeting shared and agreed objectives must be measurable. This is important because partnerships should not be vague or sentimental relationships. They are established for a purpose and this must be clear. The engagement of the private sector is more likely to endure if goals are defined and progress measured. It is the approach that I have adopted in the partnership between the Department of Labour and the 25 Sector Education and Training Authorities. It is a partnership based on agreed and measurable targets and performance outcomes and is helping us to stretch the performance of all actors.
The fourth quality of an effective partnership, I suggest, is that each partner gains from it. The benefits may be derived in terms of outcomes or results, in the learning value of taking part in a new way of working, or in the exposure to a fresh set of challenges and solutions for the common good. If the benefits of partnership are too unequally shared, the partnership will not survive very long! But in South Africa there is an element of redress in all progressive partnerships - redress that must permit that group in our society who were unfairly discriminated against in the past to 'catch up' with those who were privileged. Without this element I suggest to you that any partnership we would try to construct would be unstable and unequal!
The role and contribution of partners, and the expectations that other members of the partnership expect of them must be clear from the start. This is my fifth criterion for an effective partnership. Whilst working relationships should guarantee that all partners can contribute to debate and discussion, not all partnerships will be based on equality when it comes to decision making. As we have just discussed, equality is not necessarily the starting point of a partnership. Understanding the ground rules is, however, it is vital that members of a partnership understand not only their roles and responsibilities but also the comparative advantage that each brings to the working relationship.
I believe that partnership working will be an increasing feature of our national life. I have suggested some criteria to characterise effective partnerships. If this way of working is to succeed and bring improvements to the delivery of services and programmes, all will need to bend a little toward the common good:
Within government there is a need to strengthen the collaboration between government departments at national level as well as between spheres of government. Our President has given the lead in this regard by creating working clusters at both Cabinet and Director General level. Now the challenge before us is to see these partnerships translate into meaningful Integrated Development Plans at local level - which translate into improvements in the lives of our people.
The shift for employers is no less challenging. In a recent international study business leaders were asked if profits, the 'bottom line' should be their principal goal and yardstick of success, or if other stakeholders and values should be taken into account. Ninety-six per cent of Japanese managers agreed that profits were not the be-all and end-all of business; 86 per cent of German managers and 78 per cent of UK managers took the same view. What do you think the percentage in South Africa would be? If I look at the Growth and Development Summit agreement I am confident that our employers would score high - after all, their commitment to investment, collaboration in job creation, sharing skills, promoting equity and actively participating in local ventures can hardly be inspired by profit generation only.
The US company Johnson and Johnson famed for its household and medicinal products, adopted some 40 years ago the following as its business credo:
Service to customers comes first
Service to employees and management comes second
Service to the community comes third
Service to shareholders comes last.
Food for thought - but clearly this is a company that believes that the environment in which it functions is one determinant of its business success. A more equitable and inclusive society here must be right for business - and more than anything I believe it is this that has motivated South African business to enter the agreements of the GDS. It does not take a genius to observe that if the broader environment is unstable and volatile - returns on investment will not take long to follow suit!
For workers and community members, there are many challenges but chief amongst them is the challenge of managing the expectations for rapid change amongst their membership. Sadly, the scale of the problems inherited from the past cannot be reversed overnight. And although great advances have been made - in housing, in water delivery, in health, in worker rights and education to name but a few - for those who are poor, the pace of improvement in the quality of their lives will never be fast enough. The labour and community leaders have the great task of working with other constituencies to accelerate the pace of change but without breaking the partnership completely. It is credit to them that they have managed so well, thus far.
In his concluding address at the Growth and Development Summit in June the President said: The simple message of this Growth and Development Summit therefore is: more has to be done by all of us. Working together as partners is one way to ensure greater synergy to focus all our efforts to build on the progress that we have made since 1994. The continuing challenges - of stimulating growth, job generation, skills development and the reduction of unemployment and poverty - are real and urgent.
I think at the heart of social dialogue and partnership is a commitment to social peace, justice and prosperity. And in this regard I am reminded of the words of the great leader and teacher Mohlomi, of the Bakoena and a distant relation of the great king Moshoeshoe, who is reported to have said in about 1720, "It is better to thrash the corn than to sharpen the spear." And I am reminded too of the words of the great king himself who is reported to have often said: "Peace is the mother of nations". Surely a philosophy which is now being taken forward in NEPAD and which infused the GDS agreement?
Of course no one is talking about peace at any price, our fight against apartheid is evidence enough of that - but a peace that values equity, fairness and human dignity and yet at the same time strives to see South Africa as a country on the move with 'a market that is the first choice for investors; with a productive and skilled economy underpinned by modern management; a society with opportunities for all, that recognises people as its greatest asset and has no poverty'. Such was the vision adopted by the social partners at the Growth and Development Summit and which unites the parties to our evolving people's compact.
I thank you.
Source: Department of Labour (http://www.labour.gov.za)
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