The world may not come to a grinding halt but our economy certainly will. That’s the view of just about all of the parties that made submissions to the parliamentary portfolio committee yesterday.
It proved to be one of the most depressing portfolio committee meetings that I have ever attended. I sat and listened as each of the presenters, with one exception, described the zero-sum game that is labour relations in 21st century South Africa.
It all sounded so sadly Dickensian or, at a push, perhaps Victorian.
What had happened to the progress made by the international labour movement in the decades after World War II? What had happened to the progress made by the labour movement in the decade leading up to 1994? Where was the goodwill that made 1994 possible? We were back in a hostile war zone with a few cosmetic changes to the profile of the opposing armies.
No doubt the aggressive shareholder capitalism that has flourished across the globe since the 1980s is partly responsible. Was it Maggie Thatcher or Ronald Reagan who ruled that the only thing that mattered was capital and securing a return for shareholders? Such a ruling meant that management was free to focus on just one factor, capital. It was all about “the market”; and the market reigned with unquestioned supremacy, the same market that brought us London interbank offered rate (Libor) fixing and executive pay. The market apparently dictated that labour be treated as a disposable commodity or as the economists and labour brokers might say, labour had to be flexible. And so casualisation and labour broking began to flourish.
The push to reduce returns to labour received an enormous boost in the 1990s when hundreds of millions of Chinese workers entered the global labour market. Millions of jobs relocated to China and most of those that remained – outside the financial services sector – were under constant threat of being shipped out to Shenzehn. The Chinese seemed prepared to work in conditions that made “Dickensian” seem enlightened.
While international developments worked against the interests of labour it is also apparent that local developments played a significant role in undermining some of the progress that labour had made in the period up to the mid-nineties. Key members of the labour movement transferred to government or business after 1994, leaving the movement without many of its former champions. The effect was heightened by a more aggressive attitude from the post-1994 management class and, from the late nineties, by an increasingly ineffectual labour department. Strangely, labour is the only government department without a deputy minister.
And so now we are told that any gains made by labour as a result of the proposed amendments to the Labour Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act will result in widespread cuts in employment. We are expected to believe that this is as inevitable as it is scientific. Yesterday the members of the committee had to listen to the constant but generally unsubstantiated threat that the changes they are set to make to our labour legislation would lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.
There is much government can do to support job creation. Paying its suppliers on time would be a useful first step; cutting back on crippling red tape and corruption would also help. And the Department of Labour should be forced to police the existing labour legislation more effectively. Surely labour needs the sort of uncompromising standards provided to the Finance Department by SA Revenue Service to help it compete.