ZWELINZIMA Vavi, General Secretary of COSATU, addressed the FAWU (Food and Allied Workers Union) Eastern Cape Regional Congress last Friday.
He said: ‘We meet at a time of great upheaval in the labour market. 220,000 NUMSA members in the engineering and metals sectors are on strike, in support of fully justifiable demands.
‘NUMSA’s demands are fully in line with the resolutions of COSATU’s 2013 Collective Bargaining, Organising and Campaigns Conference and our long-standing campaigns for a living wage and better working conditions.
‘They include a one-year agreement, a wage increase of 12%-15%, a total ban on the use of labour brokers, a housing allowance of not less than R1,000 per month and no company to be allowed to implement the Employment Tax Incentive Scheme.
‘Let’s hope that the union and employers will soon reach an acceptable settlement and that other unions, including FAWU, will then make similar demands to achieve decent wages and conditions and the end of casualisation and labour broking.
‘Let’s hope also that this and other recent industrial disputes will persuade the government to speed up its promised investigation into the modalities of a national minimum wage. We have warmly welcomed the decision of the German parliament to introduce a national minimum wage there and hope that will encourage our government to do the same.
‘This could resolve many potential disputes, once lower-paid workers, which include thousands of your members who toil to produce the nation’s food, would then have the legal and constitutional right to that minimum wage and would not need to strike as so many have no alternative to do now.
‘It will start to narrow the huge and widening gap between rich and poor in South Africa, which, together with the crisis level of unemployment and poverty, lie at the heart of the wave of recent protest actions by workers and communities, and at the same time stimulate economic growth by increasing demand for goods and services.
‘A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Report on Executive Remuneration released this week revealed that the huge wage gap between the top earners and those at the bottom continues to widen. The total guaranteed pay packages for Chief Executive Officers of large companies increased way above inflation between 1 May 2012 and 30 April 2013.
‘The median-level of what they call the “total guaranteed package” of remuneration for CEOs in the top industrial companies in 2013 was R13.659 million. This works out at R1.138 million a month, 470 times the current R2,420 minimum monthly wage for farm workers.
‘You would think that no-one could possible justify such a gargantuan level of inequality, but the PWC report includes an article by right-wing “economist’’ Loane Sharpe, who tries to justify this inequality, on the grounds that executive pay has to reflect trends in the global market so that companies can attract and retain staff, and complains that South African CEO earn less than their American counterparts.
‘Yet there is no suggestion that South African workers’ wages should be compared to the USA, where the average hourly wage is $10.28, equivalent to R110, or R19,000 a month! On the contrary Sharp claims that workers’ pay is too high and blames this for the high levels of unemployment, arguing that “high” wages deter employers from recruiting the unemployed, and that raising wages will make unemployment even worse.
‘He is implicitly arguing for even lower wages, along with weakening trade unions and collective bargaining and emasculating labour laws, as the only way to increase employment, so that employers can use the ‘reserve army of labour’ – the unemployed, who they hope will be so desperate for a job that they will work for next to nothing – to force down wages and maximise short-term profits.
‘It would leave more and more workers, both employed and unemployed, so poor that they can barely afford the basic necessities of life let alone manufactured goods and services, the demand for which would fall to even lower levels, sparking a recessionary economic cycle. The PWC report will further strengthen our case for a national minimum wage.
‘There is a more urgent need than ever to speed up the 2nd Phase of the Transition for a radical restructuring of our economy from the one we inherited from the apartheid regime. As Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies warned in August 2013, South Africa faces the danger of deindustrialisation amid job losses and factory closures in the manufacturing sector, along with rising imports and declining exports of some manufactured products.
‘The centrepiece of the restructuring must be to rapidly reverse this trend, escape from our overdependence on the export of our mineral wealth and build an economy based on manufacturing industry, including the beneficiation of those minerals.
‘We need FAWU to work with progressive ministers, like those of Trade and Industry and Economic Development, to press forward with the progressive elements of the New Growth Path (NGP) and the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP).
‘The Eastern Cape is a predominantly rural province, with a large agricultural sector, which, together with mining, was the foundation on which they built their political constituency, based on white farmers and the mine bosses, both of whom still have a grossly disproportionate amount of power and influence in the economy.
‘This support was bolstered with racist legislation – the pass laws, influx control – and the migrant labour system and single-sex hostels, all of which were used to brutally enslave and exploit the black working class and consolidate the bosses’ power. The recent long strike in the platinum mines was a direct consequence of our failure to transform the mining sector, in which monopoly companies and still mainly white millionaire bosses get richer and richer while their workers toil to produce the companies’ wealth, in dark, hot, dangerous and unhealthy conditions in return for poverty wages.
‘The 2012-2013 strikes of farm workers proved that workers on the land are also running out of patience with low pay, job insecurity and super-exploitation.
‘After losing too much time in the first twenty years of democracy, we must now accelerate economic transformation. Both the NGP and IPAP identify agriculture as one of the key areas for creating new jobs and we have backed the President’s commitment in his State of the Nation speech to create a million new jobs in agriculture by 2030. We have already halted job losses in agriculture; Statistics South Africa recorded an 87,000 growth in agricultural jobs between the second quarter of 2011 and the fourth quarter of 2012, at a time when global demand was still low due to the economic meltdown in many parts of the world.
‘As well as creating employment, the expansion of agriculture must also be geared to providing food security, to make sure that no-one goes to bed hungry and that we reverse the trend which has made us a food-importing country.
‘As I said recently to your Eastern Cape comrades in DENOSA, “It is absolutely unacceptable that 13 million people go to bed hungry every night in this country, and that a further 14.8 million are at risk of hunger. Malnutrition is actually expanding, resulting in stunted growth, blindness, incomplete mental development, and other health problems. How can this be in a land where there is more than enough food produced and imported to feed the whole nation?”
‘The transformation of agriculture cannot be separated from resolving the land question. The redistribution of land stolen from the majority population has proceeded at a snail’s pace. For that reason we welcome the proposal of the minister of rural development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, to require commercial farmers to hand over half their farms to farm workers.’
