Cosatu’s threat is treasonous

Alliance dynamics short circuit the urgent challenge the country faces with Eskom

AS WE face the existential crisis of South Africa, Cosatu has embarked on strike action to protest potential job losses and the restructuring of Eskom.

This highlights the problem when a governing party includes a union federation as its partner in governing the country. And the fact is that Eskom is too critical to our economy to be held hostage by a reactive, unimaginative union movement.

When the government has to make some hard decisions to restructure an entity like Eskom, it becomes hidebound by unions who neither accept their responsibilities nor acknowledge that the very labour laws they demanded also apply to them.

Our labour law accords with the recommendations of the International Labour Organisation. Globally it is accepted that if a company is making losses or needs to restructure to become more efficient, one of the possible cost-cutting measures is retrenchment.

Retrenchment must be considered as a last resort, because the effect on employees can be devastating. But if it has to be done, it has to be done. The first priority for Eskom has to be efficient, affordable electricity production and distribution.

Cosatu says its job is first and foremost to protect its members. But protecting members’ jobs is not the only protection unions need to offer. When retrenchment is unavoidable, as it will be at Eskom, the unions need to try to negotiate the best deal possible for their members by negotiating, among other things, possible retraining, retrenchment packages, the continuation of benefits and so on.

By going out on strike, irony of ironies, Cosatu will most likely confirm to management that many employees are indeed redundant. When a union embarks on a strike, its timing must be to the best possible benefit of the membership and the employer should feel as much pressure as possible.

There is certainly little, if any, public sympathy for a Cosatu strike, particularly with the sudden imposition of load shedding.

One of the most dispiriting reminders provided by the Eskom crisis is that so many players in the political space, the ANC, SACP, the EFF, the South African Federation of Trade Unions and others, cling so tenaciously to redundant socialist/Marxist economic philosophies that they would see the country economically destroyed before they will accede to involvement of the private sector or the use of foreign experts to resolve the electricity crisis.

It’s not just that every socialist economy has disintegrated, including those currently imploding – Zimbabwe and Venezuela – it’s the failure to realise that the survival, never mind the growth, of South Africa cannot happen under leadership operating as if we are still stuck in the first industrial revolution from the late 18th century to the mid-nineteenth century.

Over three centuries later, we are faced with adapting to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, to the world of rapidly advancing information technology and artificial intelligence. Yet the Left has left its supporters unprotected as a consequence of its adherence to this failed ideology.

Contrary to union rhetoric, the private sector does not exploit workers. If they do, then labour law and trade unions come into play.

Workers do not owe their fealty first and foremost to trade unions; they are employees first and trade union members second. Without their employment by a company, they cannot be union members. It is the very fact of their employment by companies that provides trade unions their membership.

Marxist trade unions either still understand little of what it is like to start, run and grow a business or they don’t care. Much of their rhetoric conveys the impression that South African workers suffer uniquely. The bad news is that South Africans hold down exactly the same sort of jobs, on the same conditions, that exist everywhere else in the world.

The days of South Africa assuming some kind of privileged status because of its “exceptionalism” are over. We are just one of 195 countries in the world and just one of the many developing countries with whom we are competing for investment.

Running a country relies on an understanding of economics, on hard work and common sense. We don’t have the power or clout to dictate the terms of investment either to America, Britain, the EU, China or Russia. They are way too powerful and if we persist in being arrogant, we will get nothing. Their investment will just go elsewhere.

Cosatu and similarly ideological unions and federations have threatened to bring South Africa to its knees if there are any retrenchments at Eskom. South Africa is already on its knees. Such threats are tantamount to treason.

Cosatu has objected to the government bringing in outside experts to help resolve the problem. There is only one question to ask: will external experts/internal experts/privatisation help to solve Eskom’s problems? The answer is whatever will help is what needs to be done. The romantic idea on the Left that Eskom is a strategic asset that only the government should run is nonsense.

There is no debate – success in the 21st century will depend on us joining the global economy, not retreating into a moribund ideology.

Experts have been warning the government for 20 years that our electricity provision is in trouble. Yet the ANC and its partners were either too arrogant or corrupt to do anything about it. When the tripartite alliance feels shame over its culpability, then we may make some progress.

At the moment the only renewable resource we have at our disposal, as PJ O’Rourke would say, is hubris.