AUT: From South Africa

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From:
"The Star" (Johannesburg)
"Daily News" (Durban)

11 August 1999

UNIONS ARE NOT TO BE BLAMED FOR JOBLESSNESS
by Franco Barchiesi
(Dept of Sociology, Wits University)

 Not long ago, an "old" right then in power used to blame organised
labour ("communist agitators" was the usual expression, then) for
nearly any trouble affecting the country. Last Wednesday, Kaizer
Nyatsumba ("Time to Look at Our Labour Laws", The Star, July 28)
echoed a "new" right view -- certainly more respectable but not very
different ideologically -- which analyses the unemployment crisis in
South Africa in terms that sound like an increasingly fashionable and
commonsensical comeback. In fact, his dramatic representation of a
country that is sinking in a spiral of joblessness, crime and social
decay identifies only one responsible: the trade union movement.
"Cosatu", he writes, "has been at the forefront of efforts to turn
ours into a very restrictive labour system", to such an extent that
even Saki Macozoma has been "prompted" (presumably against his will
of enlightened and sensitive entrepreneur?) to ask for exemptions
from some clauses of the Labour Relations Act. Would that imply that
the tens of thousands of workers who are going to lose their job at
Transnet are the victims of labour-imposed "employment rigidity"?


Nyatsumba's conclusions leave little room to debate: "we have gone
way overboard with our labour regime and in the process overtaken
many established and reasonably opulent First World democracies".
Therefore, fundamental changes to existing worker rights and
protections in the labour law are needed, because it is important for
foreign investors to "make business sense" of investing in South
Africa.


The strategy adopted by Nyatsumba is the usual one of any
diligent spokesperson of macroeconomic orthodoxy: "objective" facts
are presented in clear-cut, excluding terms, with all their
seductive convincing power, but only after these facts have been
accurately selected to "prove" preconceived conclusions. The
conclusion here is that from new sacrifices and retreats on the part
of labour will depend South Africa's way out of the crisis. An
immediate pain is envisaged as the only way to avoid a greater,
future pain. The choice that the unions have to face in this
reasoning is straightforward: flexibility, lower wage increases,
less protections and diminishing worker rights now, or retrenchments
tomorrow. The vision of society that emerges is equally clear: the
company is the only agent of social change and well-being, profit is
the only regulator, the market is the only judge of how much rights,
income and dignity people can legitimately claim.


As in any purely ideological reasoning, omissions are at least as
important as what is actually written. A rising amount of research
(lately an ILO Report on Social Consequences of Globalisation in
South Africa) is unequivocal that the South African labour market is
already extremely flexible and that no evidence exists that a
further relaxation of employment conditions and labour laws will
create more jobs. The latest OECD Employment Outlook argued that no
clear link between flexibility and employment creation can be
presently proven in the most industrialised countries. At the same
time, it is equally documented how flexible, unprotected, casualised
and precarious forms of employment are expanding in many South
African industries (construction, retail, mining, but also chemical
and metal). Finally, Nyatsumba shows a kind of selective amnesia
when it comes to understanding the causes of job losses. Rather than
the product of uncontrollable global market forces, they are the
consequence of a restructured South African capitalism that is
becoming increasingly privatised and dependent on world financial
markets. Under these conditions, a company that retrenches is often
considered a healthy company by the very foreign investors that
Nyatsumba wants to lure in South Africa. Is it just a chance, for
example, that Old Mutual announces massive job cuts precisely when
it is going to list in the London Stock Exchange?


If we consider these facts, a picture of the current "crisis" quite
different from the one provided by Nyatsumba emerges. What we have
in this country, in fact, is that waged work is either disappearing
at an impressive rate, or it is no longer a vehicle of prosperity
and integration but becomes more precarious and exploited, and
therefore generates new impoverishment and exclusion. These aspects
are particularly painful for a working class for which very little
social rights are guaranteed in the current situation and where any
basic need has to be satisfied on the market. In fact,
municipalities often use as the only tool to repay their debts the
squeeze of impoverished unemployed and working class communities
required to pay exorbitant rates for privatised water, electricity
and services. As a result, while waged labour less and less provides
for a dignified life, the need to find a job remains the only way to
survive in a society where life has, literally, no value that cannot
be bought at market rates. Here is an aspect of "more established
democracies" (whatever this means) that Nyatsumba ignores. In many
of those countries the working class was able, through mobilisation
and struggle, to win social rights (subsidised or free services,
health care, education, public pensions) that still provide a
defense against becoming a mere variable at the mercy of the market.
For this reason Nyatsumba should be more careful before saying that
South Africa has become a heaven for working class constituencies
whose greed has "overtaken" that of Northern democracies.


At the same time, a critique of such new right arguments implies new
challenges for labour. In a context where work is disappearing or
becomes a condition for rising poverty, wage struggles are in danger
of becoming increasingly marginalised and defensive. A new agenda is
needed to complement the existing struggles, an agenda that includes
redistribution and the free provision of those basic social services
that can only unify the struggle of an embattled working class with
those of the rising legions of unwaged and precarious workers.
Sometimes, what is lost in the workplace has to be regained in the
broader society.





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| Franco Barchiesi                                            |
| Sociology of Work Unit - Dept of Sociology                  |
| University of the Witwatersrand                             |
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| http://www.wits.ac.za/fac/arts/swop/staff.htm#Franco        |
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| Home:                                                       |
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