May 6 to May 20
On three successive Fridays from May 6 to May 20, President Mbeki, in the ANC’s weekly on-line newsletter, ANC Today, raised various issues and questions that he felt workers in this country should deal with.
This is a summary of these letters. For the full text, look on the ANC’s web site – www.anc.org.za .
In the first letter, President Mbeki raised the fact that the impact of globalisation meant that workers across the world are raising similar questions when they celebrate May Day. Challenges such as workers’ rights, unemployment, casualisation, deregulation, quality jobs, outsourcing and globalisation are now common to workers across the globe.
He said that theorists from as far back as Adam Smith (his book was published in 1775), to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to present writers, allude to the problems of a world system of power imbalances. Depending on the writers’ ideology, this imbalance is either caused by the capitalist system or an imbalance of power between nations.
While Adam Smith hoped that the imbalance “would be corrected by the organic achievement of ‘equality of courage and force’ across the globe”, Marx and Engels predicted that this would be righted when “the global proletariat responded to their call – ‘workingmen of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Mbeki stressed that “all of us still have to answer the question whether we have responded adequately and correctly to the challenge posed by Adam Smith”. He felt it unlikely that it would be achieved by the “workingmen of all countries” uniting against a common enemy, the international bourgeoisie” because of the latter’s ability to move its capital across countries and “to compel all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”
Quoting from a 2002 paper written by Lucio Baccaro from the International Institute for Labour Studies (linked to the International Labour Organisation), he said that one country, Ireland , by joining in a social partnership, had turned around the country’s economy. According to Baccaro, the “Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) agreed to contain wage increases within limits negotiated at the national level. Also, the ICTU committed itself not to take industrial action that would result in additional cost increases to employers.”
In agreeing to participate to enhance “the competitiveness of the national economy” trade unions gained access to policy-making,
For its part, government “agreed to increase take-home pay by reducing personal taxation” and “maintain the real value of social welfare allowances.”
Turning to South Africa , Mbeki said that if we want to follow Ireland ‘s example, “our social partners will have to achieve a shared understanding of the ‘state of the nation'” and move beyond choosing particular messages to suit their particular interests rather than the “national interests”.
Such a shared understanding would mean agreeing on “the real situation” with regard to issues like the flexibility or rigidity of the labour market, job creation or job losses, the official definition of unemployment and its causes, the accuracy of official statistics, the differences between a grey economy and the informal sector as just some examples. In his second letter of May 13, Mbeki points to how the challenge of unemployment meant that “we have communicated the wrong message that the negative job situation represents an economy that is in deep crisis” and that necessitates a “comprehensive revision of our economic policies.”
However when compared to Ireland , the South African economy has none of the problems that spurred the Irish partnership. SA has no “skyrocketing government debt nor budget deficits, no stagnant investments, and no unmitigated job losses.”
However, this country does face many serious socio-economic challenges like: unemployment; low skill levels of its working people; high levels of poverty and gender and racial inequalities.
And because of this, there was a social partnership agreed upon at the Growth and Development Summit.
However, Mbeki urged that to tackle the unemployment issue required a response based on the “real situation”.
He said that different research papers showed that the idea of jobless growth over the last 10 years was a myth. In fact the number of jobs created did exceed the number of jobs lost but those created were not enough to absorb new entrants to the job market.
The third letter of May 20 questions the accuracy of Stats SA’s figures of 4,4 million people unemployed and “actively looking for work”. “This is such a large number of people that nobody could possibly have missed the millions that would be in the streets and village paths “actively looking for work”.
Further facts that could account for the unemployment rate being inaccurate and too high were the fact that casual workers, sub-contracted workers, part-time workers, unlicensed traders and independent contractors are mostly not counted as being employed.
For the social partners to “act together effectively, (they) must …move from a common understanding of the challenges they faced together.”
He said that employers could use the “enormous job loss” argument as a way to push government to ensure “maximum ‘labour market flexibility'” and thus roll back workers’ rights. On the other hand, trade unions could use the same argument to secure the “best conditions for the protection of the jobs of their members, including the threat posed to these jobs by the competing interests of the unemployed, who are ready to take the jobs of those who are employed.”
“Our social partners have a shared interest to defeat the related scourges of unemployment and poverty. Properly to respond to this common challenge, they will have to learn how to achieve the correct balance between their partisan and collective interests. It is only within this context that we would be able to say that the workers of this country were justified to celebrate May Day in a spirit of hope and confidence.”