Compacting for crisis rather than ideals
On the many Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other calls one has been on, there has been a recognition that fundamental change is the only way to deal with some of the thorny issues facing SA. Policy discussions on the labour market were the least.
As South Africans it seems we have at times been too happy to tinker on the margins in a context that was a manifestation of deep social and economic crisis even before the onset of Covid-19.
Having inherited a situation that was on a knife’s edge in the 1990s, it seems that many of the institutions we have created to bargain over, mediate disputes on and determine wages, have been designed as “compromise institutions ” to mediate crises rather than to aspirationally pursue an ideal industrial relations environment.
Put simply, we are compacting for crisis rather than for a commonly shared vision. The economic and other policies that require compromise, contestation and collaboration need to be stripped bare and real questions asked of what we compact around and who does so.
We have seen the failure to resolve these questions showing up at multiple levels. They are at a macroeconomic level on debates over the macro-fiscal framework, on Eskom and on industrial policy
to which many parties now brought around to the Public Private Growth Initiative (PPGI) can attest.
It is important, difficult and painstaking work. Very necessary. However, the first question is often about who is at the table.
The credibility and durability of any “pact” arrived at during this moment is determined by the content of the pact and the organisations that are party to it. Many have levelled criticism about issues of representation at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), suggesting that it creates an insider-outsider dynamic that wins gains for big business and big labour with very little else for any outsider.
While harsh, this criticism is worth engaging. For it raises not just the issues of shifts in the labour market and how those are accounted for in that tripartite (plus one) body. It also asks: to what end does the structure exist?
In the past decade, for instance, there has been a rise (alongside declining private sector union presence) in the proportion of workers with unilaterally determined wages and conditions of work.
According to Stats SA, 48.1% of workers had their employers solely determining their wages in the third quarter of 2011. By the third quarter of 2019, 52.8% of employed South Africans had no say in how their wages were determined.
These workers are the bulk of our labour market, yet from the current configuration of large business representative bodies and worker representation, their voices cannot be assumed to loom as large as their proportion of the workforce.
This, alongside a decline in bargaining council wagesetting, raises questions about the shadows ” and dark alleyways in our labour market that are emerging for all to see but seeming to be invisible to the platforms for dialogue that we have created.
Further, as the Motor Industry Bargaining Council debacle on representation at the bargaining council shows us, a failure to resolve these issues can lead not only to foregone wages but also to incessant infighting in sectors where industrial harmony complements significant state investment in production subsidies and other forms of support.
While this support has facilitated export growth for the sector and nearly R40bn in investment for the next five years by the major carmakers, it occurs in a context of tense relations between employers and employees, judging from the conversation I had with Mdu Nkosi from the National Union of Metalworkers of SA and Gerhard Papenfus from the National Employer Association on Metro FM Talk earlier in September.
Smatterings of a common vision around which we can build durable and lasting social compacts are there in pockets. However, all of the painstaking work in building incentives, and negotiating pacts and deals may come to naught if we fail to consider what ground is shifting beneath the negotiating tables, and how to include rather than exclude those systemically located on the margins of the labour market, vulnerable and precarious.