Symptom of a larger problem

Today’s strike action by the South African Cabin Crew Association (SACCA) and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) at South African Airways (SAA) is yet another test case of whether the country can weather the current economic storm.

The unions are demanding an 8% wage increase while the airline is offering 5.9%, “subject to the availability of funds from lenders” – a short but revealing line which tells us that SAA is going cap in hand to beg from lenders, thus to add to our mounting national debt since its borrowings must be guaranteed by National Treasury.

On Wednesday night, the airline cancelled “nearly all” its domestic, regional and international flights scheduled for today and tomorrow in order “to minimise the impact of disruptions for its customers”.

SAA, unions and government leadership know – or should know – of the general state of public finances which consist in an empty public purse, a shrinking tax base, a 4% budget deficit and an increasing public debt – the highest in the country’s history – and a morbid growth climate against a backdrop of growing social needs. The question is why there is still no discussion about these issues to forge consensus on all major questions that attach to them, such as wage negotiations – more so in the public sector.

It is a function of leadership – a leadership that engages each other and the population, frankly, about the real state of the nation, the options available for the country and the responsibilities that vest with each sector and the leadership to rescue the country from tipping over the cliff.

But to get our crop of political, business, labour, community and other differently situated leadership collectives to appreciate this, much less cultivate such thinking, remains South Africa’s biggest challenge.

The progressive-inclined no doubt support workers’ struggles for a living wage, greater social equity and a state that is critical of the fiction of the invisible hand of the market. But this cannot be pursued without due regard to economic, political and moral considerations.

Like most of our state-owned enterprises, SAA is in dire straits. The reasons for this are varied and multiple. The pillaging and destruction of state institutions over the past decade have had much to do with it. But we are where we are and, important as it no doubt is for lessons for the future, the mere enumeration of these factors does not help us to address the immediate problem.

The challenge at SAA, as indeed the public sector as a whole, is balancing the economic, political and moral imperatives to remunerate workers fairly and the avoidance of a collapse of national institutions and, perhaps most importantly, bequeathing future generations with a debt trap which impoverishes them before they are born. So, under the current economic climate, the politics of public sector wage negotiations ought, for the foreseeable future, to be viewed with wide angled and telephoto lenses than mere percentage demands and offers.

Taken together with broader economic policy measures, they will be part of the writing of the history of the capacity of the state in a not-so-distant future.

The discussion to be had between government, business and labour in particular, will necessarily involve the compromises and sacrifices that will have to be made by all of society in order to get the country on a reasonably even keel. The continued delay, reluctance, or avoidance, of such discussion carries less and less appreciation of the limits and possibilities of the era by social actors, inadvertently exacerbates suspicions and tensions, or otherwise widens the knowledge deficit, which makes consensus that much more difficult to grasp.

One can understand the reticence with which labour, especially, would have to such an approach since it would have to adopt a similar approach with private sector wage bargaining in the context of a long history of mistrust and continuing unfair labour practices which, in some significant respects, are reminiscent of the apartheid era.

Labour is likely to invoke the riddle of the bacon and egg breakfast, in which the chicken was involved, while the pig was committed. And so, they would argue that labour has always sacrificed while business smiled all the way to the bank, at home and abroad. But the question is whether, under the circumstances, the discussion can be avoided and what the implications are for delaying, or not having it.

This underscores the imperative of a leadership which sees beyond its sectoral interests and appreciates the larger theatre in which they manifest: the country as a whole. Without this appreciation, there can, to borrow the words of a famous philosopher, only come “the common ruin of the contending [forces]” instead of “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large”.

At a time of fiscal penury, it increasingly seems that another unavoidable discussion is an unemotive examination of which state-owned enterprises – across the three spheres of government – the country really needs as wholly or partially state-owned and which ones can be completely disposed of. The discussion undoubtedly carries a political cost and the caricatures of derogation that Finance Minister Tito Mboweni has attracted from some circles is ample proof.

But the more delayed the discussion, the closer we get to a situation in which it is most likely to be dictated by force of circumstance and by local and international actors whose outlook eschews even a modicum of state involvement in the economy and public affairs.

Public policy practitioners ought to be pragmatic about the matter, their primary concern being the need to keep the country as a going concern and cushioning, as far as is possible, the most vulnerable in society from an unmitigated gnashing of teeth.

Another, no less significant, consideration is the social and political consequences of a fiscal implosion resulting from the state’s inability to meet its post-apartheid indigent policy obligations, such as social grants and other subsidies. None, including those inclined to think of national problems and challenges in party political and factional terms, will be the safer.

Like most state-owned enterprises, SAA is in dire straits