UNIONS AS VICTIMS? HARDLY
The public sector wage talks are heading for third-party facilitation. The impasse between unions and the state continued this week in the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council after labour rejected the wage freeze that the state announced during the opening round of the talks.
The government cannot afford a pay rise for the country’s 1.3-million public servants, much less the inflation-linked one they are seeking, and unions are vying to outdo each other in getting the best deal to stanch the exodus of members.
All the while, the county battles the economic fallout of the state capture years and the financial impact of the pandemic-induced lockdown on the pockets of public servants and ordinary South Africans.
The wage deadlock appears so intractable that public service & administration minister Senzo Mchunu has even resorted to inviting the public to suggest ways of breaking it. An independent party will now be brought in to facilitate negotiations, which were tense from the start due to the way the government reneged on the third and final instalment of its 2018 three-year wage deal with the unions.
Facilitation is not new between the two sides — third parties were brought in for wage talks in both 2010 and 2018.
This time round the divide is not only between the state and labour but between the unions themselves. During talks this week, the independent Public Servants Association (PSA) moved to go straight to conciliation and potentially declare a strike — but the PSA was outmanoeuvred by Cosatu-aligned unions, which preferred to go the facilitation route, a more informal and, some would argue, political approach.
Despite political support for President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration by Cosatu leaders, particularly the federation’s president Zingiswa Losi, the pay issue poses a big threat to relations between Ramaphosa’s administration and labour. This was clear in Losi’s address on Workers’ Day on May 1.
“We have seen the government impose a four-year wage freeze on public servants,” she said.
“These are the very same nurses, doctors, police officers and teachers that we praise for serving us during this pandemic. Yet the government honours them by abandoning a signed wage agreement and does not even have the courtesy to engage workers.
“We will not allow the government and employers to destroy collective bargaining. The real reason [the] government’s finances are in a crisis is politicians and their friends have looted it to the point of collapse.”
Losi’s “looting” remarks show how much has changed within Cosatu since Jacob Zuma was still in power. When the then labour federation general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi raised the alarm about corruption in the ANC under Zuma — predating Losi’s criticism by several years — his own comrades in Cosatu turned against him and expelled him in 2015.
Losi herself was at the heart of the fight between those who were defending Zuma and those who opposed him — aligning herself with the pro-Zuma faction.
During the Cosatu ructions of the time the National Union of Metalworkers of SA expelled Losi as a member, but she was taken in (questionably, many argued at the time) by police union Popcru, which allowed her to retain a senior post in the federation.
Many of the leaders of public sector unions who are now, like Losi, condemning the austerity that the government is trying to impose because there is no money were defending the Zuma administration during the height of state capture.
They are now reaping the whirlwind of that choice — or rather, their members are.
Losi’s ‘looting’ remarks show how much has changed within Cosatu since Jacob Zuma was still in power