WEF paints ‘too bleak’ a labour picture
ILO representative says SA has excellent dispute mechanisms
● The head of the International Labour Organisation in South Africa, Joni Musabayana, says a recent World Economic Forum report ranking it the worst in the world in terms of labour-employer relations is out of touch with reality.
The study — released last week — ranks South Africa at the bottom of 137 countries in the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report.
The findings are “very different” from the reality that the ILO experiences in South Africa on the ground, Musabayana says.
The WEF findings are based on the perceptions of more than 14 000 business leaders and are supported by the unions.
“South Africans are very negative about themselves,” says Musabayana, who is from Zimbabwe and has spent many of his more than 20 years with the ILO at its headquarters in Geneva. He has headed the organisation in South Africa for three years.
“South Africans keep telling you things are so horrible, so bad. But go to the numbers and statistics.”
The report ignores how good the machinery for resolving disputes is, he says.
“South Africa has fairly advanced and sophisticated systems of social dialogue and collective bargaining. You’re comparing it with countries that don’t have such robust systems, and saying it is the worst in the world.” South Africa has institutional structures for employers and employees to engage, “and they do engage”, he says.
“The amount of space given to unions and employers to participate in policy formulation is way more than in most of the countries we work in.”
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the National Economic Development and Labour Council, which the ILO promotes globally as a model of how to manage employer-employee relations.
“It provides an institutional infrastructure for dialogue between workers and employers, and has been very effective in reducing conflict between the two.”
South Africa has one of the most “thorough-going” collective bargaining systems in the world in terms of the number of sectors that reach wage agreements through collective bargaining, he says.
“As a result, they settle most of their wage disputes without conflict. Ask the Department of Labour how many collective bargaining agreements were reached without strike action? Around 18 out of 350 disputes end up in strike action.”
But he concedes that there are challenges. The national bus strike, which is in its third week as we speak, is taking longer to resolve than necessary.
Musabayana blames a combination of historical factors and weak negotiators.
“A key factor prolonging many of these disputes is the inequality of society.” Also, “the preparedness of negotiators, the quality of negotiations, on both sides, leave much to be desired”.
A large part of the problem is that negotiators try to resolve issues that relate to government service delivery failures, which shouldn’t actually be on the table.
“Issues that under normal circumstances would not be part of a wage negotiation become part of the negotiation and prolong it.”
The conflation of labour issues with political issues makes the negotiators’s job more
I’m in a shack. You’re living in a mansion. Then you tell me 0.5% will make a big difference to you Joni Musabayana Head of ILO in South Africa
difficult, he says. “The CCMA [Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration] is not suited to go into this kind of terrain.”
Further complicating negotiations is a fundamental trust deficit between the parties that Musabayana attributes to the inequality of South African society.
“This makes it difficult for employees to accept it when employers tell them that if they give them an extra 0.5% the company will collapse. I’m living in a shack. Across the road you’re living in a mansion. Then you tell me 0.5% will make a big difference to you. That is a legacy of apartheid and that brings the nastiness to discussions.”
The remuneration gap in South Africa between executives and workers is one of the widest in the world, he says. A top executive in a South African company is paid 150 times more than the lowest worker, versus 20 times more in a Swedish company.
“These are the things that challenge relations between employers and employees in South Africa.”
He says frequent strike action in South Africa is not evidence that it has the worst labour-employer relations in the world.
“Perhaps it is resorted to much more often than is necessary, but that is because of all those other factors related to the apartheid legacy that other countries don’t have to deal with.”
That unions see bosses as the enemy more than in other countries is also more about the legacy of apartheid than poor labour-employer relations.
Musabayana says 70% of top management is composed of white men, and yet they comprise less than 5% of the population. “You don’t see this anywhere else in the world. The face of poverty is black, the face of wealth is white. As long as this remains the case you’ll always have a lack of trust.”
Transformation is not happening at a pace where the majority feel “we’re in this together”.
Musabayana, 51, who has a BSc in political science and public administration, an MBA and a PhD in business leadership, says the fourth industrial revolution is “probably the biggest challenge facing the labour market” due to higher levels of automation, particularly in the automotive, mining and agricultural sectors.
The fact that the majority of the workforce is at a semi- or unskilled level will make labour relations “even more complex”, but he says South Africa has the right mechanisms to find a solution.
The unions will threaten to bring the country to its knees, but people shouldn’t read too much into this, he says.
“The South African democracy is a very noisy place. People listen to the noise but ignore the quality of processes, structures and systems such as at Nedlac, the CCMA, the Labour Court and bargaining councils. You must distinguish the noise from the outcome.”