National protest: So many strikes, so few wins for hard-pressed workers

While trade union federation Cosatu and all its affiliated unions plan to embark on a nationwide strike in defence of workers’ rights, according to an analyst, strikes are simply symptoms of higher levels of instability.

Scheduled for tomorrow, Cosatu, with about two million members across the country, revealed the marches would take place across major urban centres in all nine provinces.

Cosatu parliamentary coordinator Matthew Parks said this was a protected strike and a Section 77 strike certificate had been issued by the National Economic Development and Labour Council, which guaranteed all workers protection if they joined the strike.

“It is a demonstration by workers that government needs to do more to end the current levels of load shedding, cable theft, crime and corruption, wasteful expenditure and austerity cuts crippling the state, suffocating the economy and further plunging workers into high levels of indebtedness and misery,” he said.

“This is also a signal to the government, the Reserve Bank, and the commercial banks that the working class can no longer afford to bear the burden of rising levels of inflation, electricity tariff hikes and relentless and reckless increases in the repo rate.”

But political analyst Professor André Duvenhage said although people were right in arguing that the country was mismanaged and there was no proper economic growth, strikes would take the country’s economy down even more than was the case in the past.

Duvenhage said there was already the perspective of the “South African Spring” which was in comparison to the Arab Spring in Tunisia.

The Arab Spring was the wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings that took place in the Middle East and North Africa, beginning in 2010, challenging some of the region’s entrenched authoritarian regimes.

The protests constituted the most dramatic wave of social and political unrest in Tunisia in three decades and resulted in scores of deaths and injuries, most of which were the result of action by police and security forces.

“I have no doubt that we are going to see high levels of political instability in the build up to the 2024 elections,” he said.

Duvenhage said many of these strikes and marches were not a rational choice type of decision but more rather interest-based focusing on the private good and not on the common good.

The union said the steps which could be taken to alleviate pressure on employees and uplift the economy included:

• Raising the R350 social relief of distress grant to the food poverty line in the October medium-term budget policy statement;
• Extending the Presidential Employment Stimulus to accommodate a million active participants in October and two million next February;
• Ensuring the implementation of the two pot pension reforms next March;
• Unblocking the delays in the roll-out of the public infrastructure programme;
• Intervening in the 36 municipalities routinely failing to pay their employees;
• Urgently intervening to prevent the collapse and liquidation of the Post Office;
• Allocating additional resources to ensure the South African Police Service, National Prosecuting Authority, Special Investigating Unit, Hawks and judiciary are sufficiently resourced to win the war against crime and corruption;
• Allocating further funds to South African Revenue Service to tackle tax evasion and customs fraud and
• Filling out of all funded public service and sector vacancies by December.