Why are we celebrating Workers’ Day when 35.3% of the country is unemployed?

As our unemployment rate rises, celebrating Workers’ Day feels as appropriate as hosting a vetkoek and potjie festival opposite a homeless shelter.

Like yeah sure, we love us a nice bit of South African heritage. Let’s just keep our heads screwed on.

It’s easy to ignore the substantially large minority in favour of celebrating the workers who are actually working. It’s just becoming more a question of what are we actually celebrating?

If you look on the government’s website, it says all the things you’d expect, “…since 1994…”, “…reminder of the critical role that trade unions, the Communist Party and other labour organisations played in the fight against Apartheid” and “…South Africa’s working classes were those most oppressed by Apartheid, the struggle for better working conditions…”.

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Cool, I get that and frankly, I could get as much of that by reading a book if only public libraries were better resourced.

I could even get on board with it if it had some obligation to make the future better along with this historical contextualizing. It doesn’t though.

So I guess I’ll be spending the day thanking trade unionists and communists for making the world of work more fair and such.

At least, I suppose that’s what I’m expected to use my ironic day off doing.

It’s just that even for those who are employed, working in South Africa kind of sucks, despite everything done to allegedly make it better.

If you happen to win your CCMA case, it could get thrown on the massive pile of reviews sitting in the labour court, costing you more than your possible winnings to fight. If you make a mistake, you need to bury yourself in paper work and hearings to fulfil “fair” procedure.

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If you don’t accept minimum wage, you can find yourself jobless in a sea of people who will likely work, under the table, for illegally less.

That’s not to say that it’s a rosy place for employers either; try firing an incompetent worker or keeping yourself out of a couple of unproductive days in the CCMA.

Let’s not even get started on labour lawyers, brokers and all the other inefficiencies the system incentivises.

So we may be celebrating workers’ rights insomuch as we may be celebrating a bunch of the other rights that show little promise of materializing. Remember when we could drink tap water and bottled water was laughable? Those were good times.

Anyway what are we supposed to do?

Should we delay the celebrations until we reach 0 unemployment? Should we only celebrate when the country has full income equality?

No! These, like most arbitrary goals, are stupid measures that could probably never be achieved.

Yet for some reason, we keep initiating policy that is supposed to get us closer to these goals and the more we do it, the more we seem to get further from them. Have you read the Labour Relations Act?

Once you get over all the subsections and amendments and regulations, you still have to factor in all the other legislation and at the end of the day, maybe there is a degree of fairness it imposes.

Accessing that fairness may be an issue. Pick any case and follow it through the Labour Court then look at the bill of costs and we can discuss this again.

Until then, what should we do with Workers’ Day? We should ask the question that we’re too embarrassed to ask: Are workers better off today than they were in the 90s?

In many respects, probably. It’s pretty nice not to get beaten up by “die baas”. Are workers in a position that their rights purport them to be though? Probably not.

Are we doing anything that actively improves the lives of workers or makes working in this country any better? Who knows. Not me. Why?

Because for some reason, celebrating Workers’ Day isn’t a thing of figuring out what’s left to achieve, it’s a thing of celebrating the basic things we achieved 30 years ago.

Yes, what was achieved years ago is awesome and worthy of praise. Is it worthy of a day off to celebrate? I don’t really care.

What I do care about is a future where the system sucks so much that there are no workers left to celebrate.

Maybe this time, we should start asking questions about that before we take a day off to celebrate in a country where 1 in 3 of us take every day off because they have to.