Sooner than later, the labour movement must recognise it can’t achieve much without addressing the systemic, structural and institutional arrangements that drive poor wages and the attack of the South African government on workers’ wages and job security.
Left Perspectives is a new monthly column by MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO, which will appear in our print edition and online.
With his extensive experience in writing and research, Mphutlane will offer valuable insights on the intersection of politics, economics, governance and development. He will aim to engage readers to demystify complex topics and shed light on unfolding events in his sphere of interest.
Mphutlane is also a poet, essayist, playwright and educator. He entered the world of socio-political and cultural activism in the early 1980s through the Black Consciousness movement in Zamdela Township in Sasolburg. His works such as Transitions: From Post-Colonial Illusions to Decoloniality and Bluesology and Bofelosophy express creativity and analysis through a unique synthesis of intellectual traditions, integrating critical and subaltern theories, Black Consciousness, Sufism and socialist humanism.
SOUTH Africa’s public service workers and unions find themselves in a serious dilemma where their efforts to use collective bargaining to push for a living wage and better working and living conditions are thwarted by the government’s dogmatic commitment to austerity measures.
The government’s obsession with freezing vacant government posts and putting a tight leash on the wages of public servants results in underpaid, overworked, strained, demotivated and disaffected workers, and slow and inadequate delivery of social services.
In 2022, the government reneged on a collective bargaining Agreement on very flimsy technical grounds that those who negotiated on behalf of government did not have a mandate. It also came with the lame excuse that it does not have the money and the blatant lie that public workers are overpaid.
The political elites did not want to face the fact that the public wage bill and state coffers are harmed not by the wages of the public workers but the top-heavy structure of the public service and high levels of mismanagement and political, administrative and bureaucratic corruption.
They also did not want to talk to the question of government corruption in the form of provision of higher degree of resources and incentives. These include tax breaks and quality health care and social amenities to the wealthy rather to the majority of the population that is under vulnerable socio-economic and financial situations.
Instead of decisive action against mismanagement and recovering money from those who stole from the public, the comprador bourgeoise in the government, who constitutes of many former shop stewards and ex-freedom fighters, decided to make workers pay for the crimes of the political elite through systematic attacks on the wages of workers in the public sector.
Rather than fill vacant posts, the government has resorted to give public service workers in so-called non-essential sectors the option to take early retirement. The reality is that freezing of vacant government posts and encouraging public service workers to retire early is going to reduce the number of workers in public service even more. What is lost to the governing political elite is that for the working-class and the under-classes all government services are essential services because they don’t have the luxury of opting for private amenities.
One does not need to master political economy to understand the inextricable link between wages and socio-economic development, and between underpaid, overworked, depressed, demotivated and disaffected public service workers and the poor delivery of social services. At the moment, trying to roll back the squeeze of the austerity measures and the entire neoliberal trajectory of the government on the poor through collective bargaining looks like a lost cause. Year after year, collective bargaining has not yielded wage increases that significantly ameliorate the conditions of workers who are already struggling to live with the meagre salaries they receive in an environment characterised by escalating price of goods and very poor social services.
The disunity of the public sector unions, their refusal to strike as one against the employer and their disconnection from the public and organised civil society makes it impossible to achieve the kind of massive strikes, stayaways and consumer boycotts that were useful tools for workers and communities in the 1980s. As things stand, no amount of suave negotiation skills shall steer the balance of forces at the bargaining table on the side of the workers. Sooner than later, the labour movement must recognise it can’t achieve much without addressing the systemic, structural and institutional arrangements that drive poor wages and the attack of the South African government on workers’ wages and job security.
Among others, the amount of money that goes to servicing the odious apartheid debt and external debt, and money that is lost through different forms of corruption and mismanagement in the private and public sector and through illicit financial flows, profit shifting and wage evasion, contributes to the decision of the government to pursue austerity measures, targeting mainly social services and the wages of public sectors.
According to international law, a loan is regarded as odious if it is ‘used against the interests of the local populace’ and should therefore not be repaid. The debt of more than 25 billion US dollars that those who partook in the CODESA mumbo-jumbo jive committed the South African people to pay, without their consent, was incurred to fund the physical, psychological and socio-economic violence of racial-capitalism against the colonised and oppressed majority. It also funded the apartheid government’s full-scale war against Mozambique and Angola, the raids of all the neighbouring states, and economic blockade on Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. As if this is not enough, the money that the people of South Africa must pay annually to service the apartheid debt takes money away from provision of social services and social and economic development programmes.
For the working-class and the under-classes, the fact that a substantial portion of the national budget is directed towards servicing this debt, thereby limiting funds available for essential services, healthcare, education and infrastructure is tantamount to paying, or rather bleeding, twice for apartheid.
Added to this is the external debt, which is around $170 billion, and putting the government in the dilemma of how to maintain a balance between paying off debt and investing in critical areas needed for development and social welfare.
This is worsened by the many ways in which big corporates hide, shift and move money away to evade tax and wages. The disastrous effects of these acts include the reduced tax revenue, lack of funding for social services, reduced public sector jobs, fiscal deficits and under-investment in job-creation and social programmes and social infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the current neoliberal paradigm of the government leads to inadequate policies and a disjointed approach to curbing illicit financial flows, profit-shifting, tax evasion and wage evasion. There is a lack of resources, capacity and support for government agencies involved in operations that seek to curb these criminal practices. Moreover, there is no effective coordination and synergy between the work that the South African Revenue Service (SARS), Financial Intelligence Centre, National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) do to curb the activities of big corporates that aim to maximise profit at the expense of workers.
According to the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC), the shortcoming of the approach of the South African government is that it treats these as individual and isolated cases of corporate corruption than as systemic issues related to economic policies and structures, such as an extractives-based economy, and the neo-liberal export-led development path. On the other hand, there is insufficient activism, mobilisation and advocacy by the labour movement, civics, and social movements around these issues. Even shop stewards and public workers who are in the public service, especially those in agencies whose functions include curbing these acts of corporate corruption, don’t have a heightened awareness of the extent to which these activities harm workers and the public.
So far, the public sector unions have not raised enough voices on the court case instituted by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) – supported by AIDC – against Samancor Chrome for alleged profit-shifting activities, following information from a whistle-blower.
This is but one example of the lack of action by South Africa’s public sector unions on broader systemic, structural and institutional transformation issues that ultimately affect all workers and the broader public.
Nevertheless, workers and unions in both the private and the public sector cannot achieve much in their struggle for better working and living conditions without focusing on the bigger issue of the transformation of the systems, structures and institutions that enable and entrench various forms of oppression, exploitation, marginalisation and disempowerment. As a matter of fact, the struggle for better working and living conditions for all can get a boost if public sector unions increase efforts to take the lead – alongside the civic and social movements – on political and socio-economic development issues such as a genuine participatory democracy that would lead to the equitable redistribution of power and resources. It is crucial to democratise both the polity and the economy in ways that meaningfully roll back structural poverty, unemployment and inequality, structural apartheid and institutional racism.
- mphutlane wa bofelo is a political theorist who focuses on the interface between politics, governance and development.
This article was first published in the December 6, 2024 print edition of Muslim Views.
