Prejudice seen as heroic work — Vavi
I F IT were not for our ugly apartheid past, we would probably just ignore Loane Sharp’s article (SA’S trade unions the biggest obstacle to job
creation, May 5), writes Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
Regrettably, we live in a society where prejudice and misinformation are presented in some quarters as heroic pieces of work. Too many people believe the hogwash contained in that article as gospel truth.
SIR — If it were not because of our ugly apartheid past, we would probably just ignore Loane Sharp’s article (SA’S trade unions the biggest obstacle to job creation, May 5).
Regrettably, we live in a society where prejudice and misinformation are presented in some quarters as heroic pieces of work. Too many people believe the hogwash contained in that article as gospel truth because it is repeated over and over again in our media.
Having said this, I thought Mr Sharp’s article would have shocked even Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the architects of neoliberalism. But it would have not shocked one Joseph Goebbels, whom Mr Sharp clearly emulates in his attitude towards unions.
What is shocking about Mr Sharp is his ability to just spew lies and statistics sucked from the fingers.
None of the figures he uses is backed by scientific research.
It is the work of Adcorp, a company of labour brokers. There is neither fact nor economic logic in any of Mr Sharp’s work.
Essentially he sees unions as a threat to the type of society he believes in, where unions are crushed out of existence, workers are nothing but tools, wages suppressed below what is required for human survival, inequalities celebrated as an act of God as believed by the apartheid architects, and poverty reigns supreme. Many South Africans know that this path will not only take us back to the conflicts of the past; it will eventually destroy mass buying power and lead to a collapse of the economy itself.
Mr Sharp is letting the cat out of the bag! He cannot wait “to smash the unions”. He proposes an eightpoint package of measures designed to smash the unions and weaken the power of workers. He is calling for a fight to the death with organisations which stand between workers and utter slavery.
According to the United Nations Development Programme report of 2010, 44% of workers are living on less than R10 a day — enough to buy them a loaf of bread a day! The top 5% of earners take 30 times what the bottom 5% take. Already 50% of SA’S population lives on 8% of the national income and the top 50% lives on 92% of national income. Even the youth, which Mr Sharp seeks to bribe, 30% of them currently earn less than R15 a day according to the International Labour Organisation.
Mr Sharp latches onto the usual scapegoat when it comes to education: the South African Democratic Teachers Union. He decries “the rising cost and deteriorating quality of government education” and then theorises: teachers’ unions influence over government schools makes black matrics unemployable, and trade unions keep black youth who by some miracle become employable out of work”.
Then the ominous words follow: “crush the power of the trade union movement”! Unfortunately for Mr Sharp, the reality is that trade unions, together with the ministers of basic and higher education, are forging ahead to fix the education system. Clueless as he is about what is going on in education and nonsensical as are his assertions about the economy, Mr Sharp looks forward to a youth wage subsidy as the magic solution to the problem of youth unemployment, which the Congress of South African Trade Unions has shown time and again not to be a solution at all.
Mr Sharp says the current poverty, poverty wages and inequality are not enough and we must adopt an economic model that exists only in his mind, to worsen poverty and inequalities, as we embark on an unprecedented race to the bottom. He is articulating in the crudest language, the views of the most backward employers, particularly labour brokers, like his own Adcorp.
This is nothing but an attack on the living standards of SA’S working class. It is actually a declaration of war and battle lines are drawn! The youth wage subsidy story is just an entry point to this war. This war is now being fought in the streets and in newspapers; it is being fought in research institutes and government departments, in lecture halls and at dinner tables.