Cosatu preserves the status quo and promotes the interests of the privileged few

Business Day
19 January 2010
Jonathan Yudelowitz

THE Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (Cosatu’s) call for a debate to determine an economic system for SA that accelerates growth, creates jobs and an equitable and sustainable distribution of wealth is welcome and necessary.

But, in order for this call to be credible, Cosatu needs to examine the harmful effects of its own ideologies as incorporated in SA’s inflexible labour policies, which are designed to serve its own parochial interests.

The trade unions’ political power has always been central to SA’s unequal system — white trade unions benefited from job reservation, so they supported apartheid.

After 1980, no longer exclusively white, recognised unions recruited in a labour pool artificially restricted by influx control, and added status as the only lawful outlet for rightful black political expression.

In the transition to democracy and after, Cosatu mobilised the electorate, complementing the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) legitimacy and cachet with its own superior organisational and leadership competence.

In return, unions were allowed to maintain their current self-serving, hegemonic control of labour policy.

Cosatu-led labour policy has failed either to create employment or to increase productivity — which is far lower than other now successful emerging economies with iniquitous economic histories, such as Brazil and India, with whom we aspire to be compared.

It is ludicrous to allow the union “haves” to dictate economic policy, at the expense of the unemployed, now at 24%.  Mired in poverty, nearly a quarter of our population is denied the material benefit, personal fulfillment and hope derived from work — constituting a dangerous threat to our social and political stability.

The unions’ strategy to codetermine economic and labour policy with business and the government has produced only transactional, bureaucratic structures such as Nedlac, sector-bargaining forums and sector education and training authorities , which do not incorporate the dynamism and ingenuity so impressively evident in our informal economy, our emergent youth culture — and dare we say it, our dangerous but inventive criminals.

The skills offered by the influx of hungry, educated foreign job seekers are ignored by Nedlac, Cosatu and the Department of Labour, who instead preserve the status quo and promote the interests of the privileged few.

They presided over the demise of the textile and garment industries, while labour brokers and the informal economy continue to create jobs and respond to changing economic and social circumstances.

IF THE unions are to help to define SA’s economic policy, they need to face up squarely to reality, question their assumptions, learn and adapt as they go.

But the unions admit no failure.

Instead, they try to destroy anything that threatens their hegemony, which is why they gun for labour brokers who efficiently provide a “foot in the door” for the unemployed, helping them to gain experience and skills through meaningful, albeit temporary, employment.

Without labour brokers, retailers would not have extended shopping hours, to all our benefit, nor would the current temporary programme to build and upgrade infrastructure — which has tempered our recession and will leave a long-lasting value-creating legacy — have been possible.

For a business to prosper there must be a strong relationship and understanding between workers, management and owners to match labour to the particular businesses’ goals — a model that ensured the success of the Japanese economy and is now emulated by Korean and other Asian companies.

The unions’ success in imposing industry-wide, as opposed to enterprise level, collective bargaining has entrenched their vested interests, impedes the economy and indoctrinates the workers to pay allegiance to the union rather than to his employer.

We will not progress unless we scrap the labour relations framework, originally conceived during apartheid to protect the urban working class.