A Cosatu strike about something we can finally all get behind… kinda

How exciting! Strike season is upon us once again but this time, the goal is hardly higher wages.

I guess Cosatu has finally come to terms with the fact that there is nowhere to source current wages, let alone higher ones. Whatever their rationale, the end game is great… at least on face value.

The strike aims to tick all the right boxes; fuel caps, RAF reform, load shedding, price gouging, private investment and xenophobia.

I don’t think South Africa has ever seen a strike that attempted to deal with as much commonality.

Regardless of circumstance, nobody is really into the idea of load shedding save for a couple of solar battery providers and I think we can all agree that paying a bit more for fuel sucks, unless you’re an attorney specialising in RAF claims.

So great! Right? Well, uhmm, I mean, no.

Cosatu members (and those of Saftu) are going to strike and then…? This isn’t one of those situations where you can shut down an ailing economy to show your strength because the strength is hardly there in the first place.

As it is, job growth is nowhere near where we need it to be and as prices rise, affording labour is going to be more out of reach than before. So have your strike if that is what makes you happy but at some point, we need to get out of this knee-jerk reaction that when we’re unhappy, we go on strike, even if we can already predict that the strike will have very little progress.

ALSO READ: Cosatu’s ‘irresponsible’ national strike could sink economy even deeper

What’s even weirder is that with its 1.8 million members and as a member of the Tripartite Alliance, Cosatu is encouraging a strike to compel a government that it is largely responsible for. Move 1.8 million votes away from the ANC and that would klap them down to about 51% before even allocating those 1.8 million elsewhere.

Cosatu has actual power to compel reform from the inside and it knows it. Their spokesperson Sizwe Pamla has been pretty frank about the internal conflict presented by this strike within the alliance.
And there will be several issues where Cosatu and the ruling party remain aligned. Both like a minimum wage. Both like workers’ rights. However, those are low hanging fruit and it’s exciting to see a power player actually take some sort of action.

When all the corruption was running wild in FIFA, allegedly, no country, club nor player could do anything about it. Yeah they spoke out about it but the complacency was there…until the sponsors started the get threatening. That’s when Blatter was ousted and a cleanup initiated. We can argue about the effectiveness of such a cleanup but it’s not the point.

The point is that in order to effect change, the threat has to be viable.

In South Africa, we are numb to strikes. So much so that we kind of expect them and they have become an institutional part of the negotiation process. We know people can strike but the point is to illustrate a unified show of some kind of force. If there’s no force, there’s no real effect to the strike.

ALSO READ: ‘People weren’t jobless under National Party’: Cosatu members march against high cost of living

Cyril Ramaphosa and his top five will be looking at this strike and just adding another row to an excel spreadsheet as another in a long list of protests.

However, if the threat is that Cosatu may compel its members to vote differently and that the current top six could be liable for breaking a long held political alliance, they would at least need to open a new tab and make some sort of plan to get their act together.

It was all fun and games when they could loot and blame pre-94, give away a couple of houses and create the expectation of better things to come. But that’s the thing with creating expectations; you need to actually deliver.

When UberEats and MrD have a better delivery track record than your government, it’s no longer just the rich people complaining under their breath. It’s the poor who couldn’t afford to pay for their own delivery in the first place.

Cosatu has the right priorities on this one. Time will tell if they have the right ammunition to take the shot.