Ramaphosa’s grand social compact does not look possible
Like many of us, some more ambitious than others, Cyril Ramaphosa has a dream. In the one or two seminal speeches he has made since he became president he has said that the cornerstone of his presidency will be a social compact in which the two big interest groups in our society, business and labour, engage in give and take to create peace and prosperity for all.
At his state of the nation speech in February, he said: “Together we are going to make history in our country. We have done it before and we will do it again — bonded by our common love for our country, resolute in our determination to overcome the challenges that lie ahead.” In that speech he announced a jobs summit and an investment summit.
In his budget speech in parliament in May, Ramaphosa said: “We are working with labour, business and communities to forge a new social compact around job creation, which will form the basis for a broader compact around growth, development and transformation. The jobs summit is an important part of this effort. With preparatory work already under way in the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), the jobs summit needs to produce extraordinary, far-reaching measures to create jobs.”
Political analysts have fed into the social compacting mythology, arguing that though the ANC is divided and the country in trouble, Ramaphosa will transcend it, uniting us with his negotiating skills and experience. But with the jobs summit approaching — probably in October — it is time to get real about expectations.
In the political conditions in which we find ourselves, a grand social compact does not look possible. Interests are just too embedded: labour will defend its members, no matter the social cost; business — though it might agree to projects and programmes — will defend its investments and returns, continuing its move offshore, despite the consequences.
The government, as before, will mediate between the two. Without an economic plan, the government is not capable of presenting a compelling case to the social partners or society at large for how to change the way we live and work in future. Summiting, it seems, absolves it of its responsibility to lead when it is leadership and decisionmaking that are most needed to break the logjam.
Some may find letting go of this social compact ideal hard. Our proudest achievement as South Africans was the social compact that ended apartheid and the writing and adoption of the constitution thereafter. But despite the creation of a substantial architecture expressly for the purpose of social compacting in the form of Nedlac, we have failed to repeat that success.
Why has it been so hard? The ANC-Cosatu alliance has played no small part in ensuring that tripartite negotiations have always been intensely political and that labour has an extra ace to play at the table, rendering the interaction somewhat unfair.
This political imbalance aside, the history of summits and tripartism has been about attempts by business to extract concessions on labour rights and attempts by labour to impose restrictions on investment decisions by business, such as securing a moratorium on retrenchments. These have featured strongly at all past summits. Both have always been and will always be nonstarters.
WITH THE JOBS SUMMIT APPROACHING — PROBABLY IN OCTOBER — IT IS TIME TO GET REAL ABOUT EXPECTATIONS
Work under way in Nedlac on the jobs summit has so far steered clear of the big political debates like these. After years of failure and now in an environment of desperation — and hopefully greater social awareness over poverty and inequality — business seems to have dropped its labour market flexibility mantra. Cosatu, though, is gearing up for a fight on the same old issues, saying unless the government denounces its intention to retrench public sector employees, it will not attend.
Working groups are focusing on projects, microeconomic reforms and plans for sectors with highyielding employment prospects. But the political process — which brings together political leaders with the head honchos of business and labour and will pull the whole thing together — is still to get under way as the summit nears. When it does, we can expect that, for instance, a demand for a moratorium on all retrenchments, both public and private, will be put onto the agenda.
In the months leading to the summit the most important thing will not be whether the government and business can be kept at the table or how long the list of summit projects is at the end. It will be whether the government can put forward a plan that can move the country forward.