Unionised workforce still ideal

We celebrate May as workers’ month, to remember those who sacrificed so much to improve the lives of workers and the many challenges still to be overcome.

This week, not only are we celebrating Workers’ Day on 1 May but also 32 years of democracy on 27 April. Both provide an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come as workers and still have to journey.

The trade union movement’s contributions to improving the working and living conditions of workers across the world are immense. Key victories it has won have included achieving recognition for the right to form trade unions, to collective bargaining, to strike and ending some of the most abhorrent forms of exploitation at the workplace, including child and forced labour.

Closer to home the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) played a key role defeating the apartheid regime, achieving the 1994 democratic breakthrough, crafting our progressive Constitution and labour laws, ensuring 60% of the Budget is invested in uplifting working-class communities amongst many other important gains.

Critics correctly challenge Cosatu not to rest upon past victories’ accolades but to continuously raise the bar and earn the trust and confidence of workers and society.

Analysts correctly argue that organised labour needs to work closely with government and business to address South Africa’s many entrenched and painful socio-economic challenges. This is a point Cosatu has long embraced and spent considerable effort on because neither government nor social partners can overcome these obstacles alone.

This is a call that trade unions have pursued with great success in Sweden, Norway and other countries where the progressive agenda and spirit of social dialogue and compacts have achieved great success in building inclusive economies, where workers’ rights are protected, inclusive growth and high living standards secured.

Workers need businesses to do well to ensure they remain employed, jobs can be created, working conditions are improved and employees are paid a living wage. 

Businesses need to appreciate that their most important asset is their staff, to treat workers well and invest in them, as a happy worker is a productive worker.

The government needs thriving businesses, well-paid workers and falling unemployment to generate the taxes required to fund the public services society requires.

Cosatu and its affiliates work closely with employers in both the public and private sectors, at bargaining councils, sectoral master plans, Nedlac and Parliament. Of course, where there are differences, these must and are tackled, often sharply as labour and business interests and mandates differ on many issues.

It is with this spirit of social compacts, the national interest and advancing working class struggles that Cosatu has pursued a variety of key socio-economic interventions over the years, not only to champion the interests of workers but also those of the economy and society at large.

In 2019, after extensive negotiations chaired by then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, business and labour achieved the historic National Minimum Wage boosting the wages of six million impoverished workers and injecting a sorely-needed stimulus into the economy. 

It has been one of the most important interventions since 1994 to uplift the most vulnerable parts of the workforce, to reduce poverty and inequality, to improve the lives of the working class and inject stimulus into the economy.

In 2020, Cosatu drafted the Eskom Social Compact, later adopted by government and social partners at Nedlac, not only to secure workers’ jobs but to ensure the ability of the entire economy to function. Workers’ jobs cannot be secure unless the economy has reliable electricity. 

This Compact relieved Eskom of R250 billion worth of debt, enabling it to ramp up its maintenance and investment programmes and thus end the debilitating loadshedding that had threatened the entire economy. Cosatu continues to work closely with Eskom, government and industry to now find ways to reduce the price of electricity as this is key to economic growth as well as reducing the increasingly high cost of living.

During COVID-19, Cosatu worked closely with government and business at Nedlac to help oversee the health and safety, as well as socio-economic responses to this devastating pandemic. Sectors where union membership and collaboration with employers are the strongest saw the highest vaccination rates, saving millions of lives and livelihoods.

Labour and business worked closely with the government to help ensure the release of over R65 billion to 5.7 million workers to help them to provide for their families and the introduction of the SRD Grant helping eight million unemployed persons. 

These helped keep the economy going. Countless hours were spent by unions and businesses to make sure this relief found its way to factories, restaurants and other workplaces and ultimately to the pockets of workers and their families.

The key for unions to remain relevant to workers is to address their most basic needs. This means unions have to be on the ground with workers, representing them and securing positive wage increases and improving their working and living conditions. 

Cosatu and its affiliates routinely train shop stewards on labour laws and other important tools to empower workers and ensure they are able to exercise their hard-won labour rights.

It means putting money in their pocket. The Two-Pot Pension Reforms that Cosatu drove have provided relief to millions of highly indebted workers (over R70 billion to more than four million workers to date) whilst simultaneously boosting long-term retirement savings.

Cosatu has long championed local procurement. This is a call that the entirety of government, the private sector and consumers need to embrace. Supporting locally produced goods; be it clothes, shoes, food, furniture or cars is one of the most important ways to save jobs and businesses and secure sustainable growth.

Simultaneously we have worked closely with the South African Revenue Service to ensure that it has the resources needed to tackle tax and customs evasion.  

This is key to protecting local jobs and businesses as well as ensuring that the state has the funds necessary to provide public and municipal services required by working-class communities and the economy. Much of the nation’s attention over the years has been on the Budget and finding the right balance between raising revenue and prioritising expenditure. 

The focus of Cosatu’s extensive engagements on the Budget at Nedlac and Parliament has been to ensure it capacitates the state to provide the services the working-class depend upon, inject the stimulus needed to unlock economic growth, provide relief to the poor and a path to employment for the unemployed.

A progressive budget is intrinsic to creating jobs and improving the lives of the working class.

Cosatu is often attacked by its critics when workers go on strike. The question should be how can we address workers’ grievances timeously and thus boost labour market stability? 

This requires employers to respect collective bargaining and our labour laws, engage with unions in good faith and pay workers a living wage. In short, value employees. This is key to a productive economy.

A key model for building trust between workers and employers is the co-determination approach used with great success in some of the major companies in Germany, Sweden and Japan.

Worker representation on company boards builds a better understanding of workers’ frustrations by the employer and enables workers to have a greater stake in the companies’ success. 

Reducing the wage gap between employees too is critical to reducing unacceptable inequality levels. Some of the most difficult challenges facing unions include organising the unorganised. 

Accessing farm and domestic workers who are scattered far and wide and petrified of losing their jobs is tough. Recruiting workers through labour brokers and more recently e-platform companies is not easy, as many are vulnerable, casual or wrongly regarded as self-employed.

Unions need to keep pace with the evolving nature of work and to prove their relevance to young people entering the labour market for the first time.  They will join unions that can protect their livelihoods and improve their working conditions. Struggle songs and T-shirts are not enough.

Organising is never easy but if it could be done during apartheid’s darkest days, then surely it can be done in the comfort of a constitutional democracy.

We are proud of how far Cosatu has come since it was launched 40 years ago in Durban and the role it has played in ending apartheid, securing our constitutional democracy, uplifting workers and enshrining their rights into law.

Equally we dare not be complacent when faced with a staggering 41.1% unemployment rate, entrenched levels of inequality and poverty, endemic crime and corruption, struggling public and municipal services, amongst many other dire challenges. 

Our task is to lead the struggles against these and improve the lives of the working class.

Are unions still relevant today? Yes, they are and will remain relevant as long as workers are not paid a living wage, are subjected to abusive working conditions, or live in communities where a better life remains a distant dream.  That is what drives Cosatu.

Zingiswa Losi is the president of Cosatu.