‘MONOPOLY capitalism is plunging the country into a catastrophic crisis, which will inflict misery upon millions of workers and the poor,’ the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) declared in a statement issued last week.
NUMSA said it is ‘appalled’ by the employment figures for the first three months of 2016 released on 9th May 2016 by Statistics South Africa. In a country which already had one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world, the percentage of workers without a job soared from 24.5% in the fourth quarter of last year to 26.7% in the first three months of this year, an increase of 2.2%.
The more realistic expanded unemployment rate, which includes those who were available to work but did not look for work in the period, rose even more sharply, by 2.5% over the same three months, from 33.8% to 36.3%.
This means that 5.7-million people who are actively looking for jobs cannot find any‚ up from 5.2-million people in the fourth quarter of last year, a rise of half a million. The number of employed people dropped by 355‚000 in the first quarter of 2016‚ says Statistics SA, the largest decrease since 2010.
These grim statistics confirm Numsa’s fears that we are in the midst of a job loss bloodbath. The largest losses were in construction‚ manufacturing‚ and trade. Jobs in manufacturing, where most Numsa members work, declined both quarter-to-quarter, by 100,000, and year-on-year, by 141,000.
As economic growth is barely crawling ahead, companies are struggling to survive while at the same time more people have reached working age and are starting to look for jobs. This confirms the union’s view that monopoly capitalism is plunging the country into a catastrophic crisis, which will inflict misery upon millions of workers and the poor.
It is part of a global recession in which South Africa is especially hard-hit. This will however strengthen the workers’ determination to fight against a capitalist system which ruthlessly exploits them when they are employed and then tosses them back on to the scrapheap when the economy crashes.
Workers are more determined than ever to fight, both to save their jobs and improve their living standards and for a fundamental socialist transformation of the economy and society.
As Numsa’s President, Andrew Chirwa, said at the union’s recent National Bargaining Conference (NBC): ‘Capitalism is a system that enslaves others for their labour in order to enrich a tiny minority. For the world working class, it matters little whether capitalists are happy or not: we are its slaves – they own our labour, and therefore, they own us. To survive, we need their wages.
‘Now, when their system, which is always a crisis for the working class, is not working well, they hire fewer workers, pay low wages, become more brutal in the work place, and generally do not care about the safety of workers as they struggle to squeeze as much profits as possible from the workers.’
Numsa will never accept that workers must pay for an economic crisis that is none of their making, but a structural crisis of a global monopoly capitalist system. We will not compromise our members. The NBC was clear where the real blame must be laid for this economic catastrophe.
It is not only a reflection of the global crisis, but a direct result of the neo-liberal agenda of the ANC/SACP government, which has created our own, self-inflicted crisis. The recent crisis of jobs has raised calls for government to designate all products we have capacity to manufacture in the country to be manufactured and produced by local companies, meaning we stop all SOEs and private companies importing products that can be produced in South Africa. This will go a long way to create jobs.
Government must swiftly move to dump the current macro-economic framework and re-nationalise the steel industry. This means that with speed the government must take over Evraz High veld steel and reopen it on an urgent basis, and open Mapochs Mine and Vancham.
But the government must not just nationalise the steel industry only, but the whole value chain: iron ore, manganese, coal, and vanadium. Eskom must deliver cheap electricity tariffs to battling industries, and small medium size companies. We are in the midst of a national emergency and we demand that government does what is necessary to build our economy rather than the profits of their friends, the white monopoly capitalist elite.
So we repeat the call by the NBC to campaign to:
• End the investment strike by South African capital
• Stop capital leaving the country so that it is invested here
• Introduce prescribed assets requirements for investors, to ensure socially acceptable investment patterns
• Cut interest rates so there is more investment for industry
• Increase tariffs to protect our industries
• Stop giving subsidies to companies who buy components from companies who have moved production to other countries
• Provide us with decent public transport, education and health services, all of which will also create jobs
• Nationalise the Reserve Bank and use it to target employment creation not inflation
• Price controls and subsidies for basic goods and services.
These latest unemployment statistics will make us more determined than ever to build the new independent, democratic, militant workers federation and to forge ahead with the creation of the new workers’ socialist party. Meanwhile, earlier this month NUMSA welcomed the dismissal by the Pretoria High Court of the application by the Free Market Foundation (FMF) to change the law on collective bargaining.
The FMF were challenging section 32 of the Labour Relations Act, which allows collective agreements reached in bargaining councils to be extended to employers in the same sector who are not party to the negotiations. They wanted the wording of the act changed to ensure that the labour minister ‘may’ extend agreements struck in councils, as opposed to ‘must’ as it is now in the Act.
Their argument was that the current system enables collusion between large business and labour, to the detriment of smaller companies, potential new entrants and the unemployed. Numsa, along with 47 collective bargaining councils, Cosatu and the SA Clothing and Textile Union, opposed the application. Numsa insists that collective bargaining is essential if unions are to improve workers’ wages and working conditions.
If the FMF had succeeded, collective bargaining agreements would become meaningless pieces of paper, which employers could treat as voluntary, and simply ignore them. Even those employers who signed would then be under pressure to renege on the agreements, as their competitors cut their labour costs below the rate agreed by the council. It would start a race to the bottom in wages.
Collective bargaining must not only be continued but must be extended to all workers, only 23% of whom are presently covered by collective bargaining agreements. 54% of all wage increases are simply imposed by employers without any negotiations.
The FMF want to increase this figure from 54% to 100% by effectively destroying all collective bargaining structures and leaving all workers at the mercy of employers.
They are backed by the Democratic Alliance, whose candidate for Mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, launched the FMF case while still its Chairman.
Numsa will do the same to defend the Metal Industry Bargaining Council against the National Employers’ Association of South Africa (NEASA), which is working very hard to destroy it.
While welcoming the court ruling however, workers should not drop their guard. The FMF are likely to appeal and will look for other weapons to intensify the bosses’ offensive against trade unions and workers’ living standards. Employers are hell-bent on weakening the unions and rolling back institutions like collective bargaining councils, which have at least partially enabled workers to resist their attacks.
Already over 70% of workers are not only not covered by collective bargaining; they are not even members of trade unions but are left to struggle on their own. Many employers ban unions in their workplaces and threaten to dismiss any who joins one despite their constitutional right to join.
They cynically exploit workers’ fear of being unable to find any alternative employment to bully them into submission. This bosses’ assault is a warning to workers that, as unions become more and more fragmented and consequently weaker, our class enemies have been quick to take advantage and gone on to the offensive.
That is why it is now so important and urgent for the implementation of the declaration of Workers Summit on 30 April 2016 to form a new independent, militant and democratic trade union federation to as quickly as possible.
The Summit also agreed that one of the new federation’s first tasks must be to organise the unorganised and vulnerable workers into the union movement, and to fight job losses and for decent living minimum wages for all workers.