South African society is on fire, literally in Cape Town’s unprotected mountainside shack settlements, and figuratively around the country. Workers and the poor are smouldering with anger and frustration at the failure, 22 years after the end of apartheid, to achieve the improvements promised in the Freedom Charter to share the country’s wealth among all our people.
Workers are under attack on all fronts – in the workplace, in their communities and in society at large.
Wealth and power remains firmly in the hands of increasingly rich mainly white capitalists, while the overwhelmingly black poor majority see no way out of poverty and marginalisation, and the entrenched racism that still festers more than two decades after it was supposed to have been ended.
The crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality, far from being resolved, is getting worse. According to three University of Cape Town economists: “A study we recently undertook suggests that Statistics SA’s poverty line underestimates poverty. The Stats SA line indicates that approximately 53 percent of South Africans are poor, but ours suggests that this is closer to 63 percent.”
And now, scandalously, Eskom are trying to force consumers to pay a whopping 17 percent more on their electricity bills.
Likewise, the government repeatedly declares that unemployment is in the range of 25 percent, which would be bad enough, but they are in denial, by not including unemployed people – more than 10 percent of the workforce – who have given up looking for jobs because there are none, which pushed the rate up to 34 percent. They refuse to recognise that we face a crisis of deep-rooted structural mass unemployment.
Youth are the main victims. There are 20 million South Africans between 15 and 34 years of age, and of these, only 6.2 million are employed, a far lower share than in 2009, according to Stats SA.
Thousands of other workers now face a jobs-loss bloodbath, as entire industries face possible obliteration – mining, steel, the Post Office, SAA, etc.
Inequality has risen since 1994; if you simply take income inequality, even the World Bank admits that the Gini coefficient is 0.77, on a scale of 1 (where one person has all the income) to zero (where income is equally shared).
The state welfare grants that go to 17 million people are shrinking in value – Nhlanhla Nene lowered them in real terms by more than 3 percent in last year’s Budget, given the higher rate of inflation on food, energy and transport faced by poor people. The child grant of R340 is worth 67 US cents a day, about a third of what even the World Bank considers poverty. Angry communities are increasingly taking to the streets, often violently, in protests of housing, water, roads and corruption in service delivery.
Labour relations are at their lowest ebb since the end of apartheid, with employers doing everything they can to erode hard-won workers’ rights and cut their wages, through the use of labour brokers, outsourcing work, getting around collective bargaining and even refusing to recognise trade unions.
This crisis in labour relations has not gone unnoticed even by our class enemies like the World Economic Forum, representing the elites from corporations and governments. They produce tables showing how well 140 countries are performing in various areas. In the latest, the table in the category of “Co-operation in labour-employer relations”, we are ranked 140th – the worst in the whole world.
Tax amendment laws
As if all this was not bad enough, the capitalists, who daily rob workers of the fruits of their labour, have convinced the government, to let them carry on robbing workers even after they stop working, by stealing from the small amount of their pitiful wages, which workers have saved for their future.
The government has signed into legislation new “tax amendment” laws, which will prevent workers from taking most of their provident fund contributions when they retire. Instead they must take the majority of it as a monthly amount, for as long as they may live.
We at Numsa (National Union of Metalworkers of SA) state that without abolishing the apartheid economy and society, no meaningful provident or pension fund system can be established in post-apartheid South Africa. South African capitalism feasts on the poverty, unemployment and low wages, and extreme inequalities afflicting the black working class.
We urge all workers to unite to defeat this law and demand that:
* This legislation must be repealed immediately.
* The government must urgently introduce a comprehensive social security system on which workers must be fully consulted before any proposal goes before Parliament.
* The apartheid wage system, which crushes millions of black workers in employed poverty, must be abolished.
* A national living wage must be introduced with speed.
* A comprehensive national health insurance system must be created.
* The working class housing crisis must be resolved.
* Legislation must be made to radically transform the trillion-rand lily white and capitalist retirement industry and place it under workers’ control.
This is workers’ own money, part of their wages. Previously they had a choice: they could take their retirement money as a lump sum or they could use it to buy a pension. From now on, they will be forced to receive the majority of it as a pension, through what is called “annuitisation”.
From March 1 onwards, the law will apply to all workers, apart from those over 55. This is an attack on workers’ basic rights, in particular on young workers, who will be most affected, as they have their whole working life ahead of them, so all their savings will be affected.
What makes it even worse is that these laws have been pushed through without agreement having been reached at Nedlac, the government, labour and business negotiating chamber.
During our militant struggles of the 1980s the workers’ movement fought for the right to choose whether to take a lump sum when they retired or to receive a pension. To this end the Cosatu that we knew then fought to convert those pension funds into provident funds. But now the ANC/SACP government is reinstating the original apartheid pension system. Our members demanded then what they are demanding now – the right to choose.
In plain language that means workers will be required to use their savings as “grants” so that the state does not have to pay them. It is a fundamentally neoliberal law and a form of privatisation, given that the retirement fund companies are overwhelmingly owned and run by financial capitalists, who use the workers’ money to invest where they can make big profits.
This form of privatisation of retirement is an even more toxic privatisation than most other forms, as it uses the workers’ own money.
The argument of the Treasury, ANC and business is that workers must be forced to save in order to invest in, and grow the capitalist economy, thus converting workers’ savings actually into state pensions and grants. By this deceitful device, the state will save on grants and state pensions. That is why we demand the nationalisation of the industry, under workers’ control, so that the money in these retirement funds is used to build houses, schools and hospitals and improve the lives of workers and the poor.
At the core of our opposition is that the ANC neoliberal government ignores the fact that millions of working-class people live in grinding poverty. They are blind to the fact that hundreds of thousands of workers are deep in debt after struggling to survive on poverty wages and we still have no comprehensive social security, national health insurance scheme or a national living wage.
Retiring without being able to choose to cash in provident fund money will plunge thousands into abject poverty, because, in the circumstances, they see this as their only possible lifeline.
Nationalise the banks
In Davos, Switzerland this week, the World Economic Forum is discussing how to squeeze workers even harder. This year’s theme is the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which mainly translates into robots replacing people in industry, mining and even the services sector. This is all but another desperate blind search for solutions to the global capitalist crisis.
Due to their moral, philosophical, intellectual and ideological poverty, the world capitalist elites cannot sort out the world economic crisis, which is partly due to the lack of buying power of the world’s working class – and instead their self-destructive solution is to replace workers with machines, ignoring the vital question of our time: Who will buy the goods they produce?
The Freedom Charter promised us that: “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.”
The ANC’s 1969 Morogoro Strategy and Tactics statement was equally clear: “To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.”
Yet white monopoly capital still has a stranglehold on economic and therefore political power.
* Irvin Jim is the general secretary of Numsa. This is an abridged version of his statement on the state of the South African economy issued yesterday.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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