Vavi slams proposed R20 per hour national minimum wage

General secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) Zwelinzima Vavi said it was an indictment for unions and formations representing the marginalised people that half of the country’s workforce earned below R3 400.

Speaking on Radio 702, Vavi said Saftu did not agree with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) – the trade union he worked for previously – that the proposed R20 per hour national minimum wage was a good start and a step in the right direction.

Cosatu said on Tuesday it was disappointed that parliament and the government would not be ready to implement the long-delayed national minimum wage by May 1.

The national minimum wage envisages that farmworkers and domestic workers get a rate of R18 an hour and R15 an hour respectively and that this is raised to R20 an hour within two years of implementation.

Vavi said the fact that so many workers in the country earned a pittance was the reason why South Africa had become the most unequal society in the world.

“It speaks to the fact that over two decades of democracy we have seen, the beneficiaries of the economy have been the same people who were benefiting during the colonial and apartheid era,” Vavi said.

He added that the fact that so many of the workers earned so little meant the face of unemployment, poverty, inequality and “poverty pay” remained the race group that had been the victim of colonialism and apartheid.

“To make so much noise as Cosatu is making, to beat drums and claim that there is a breakthrough when they are increasing that ridiculous extreme poverty, slave wage to now R20 an hour, R18 for farm workers […] R11 for Extended Public Workers is actually a betrayal of a true radical economic transformation that will ensure that we bury the apartheid wage structure,” Vavi said.

He said the fact that Cosatu welcomed the national minimum wage meant the trade union was captured and had abandoned the interests of farm and domestic workers.

He said Cosatu had decided at its congress in 2012 that the national minimum wage should not be far below the national minimum living level, which was at R4 500 supporting a family of five at the time, according to calculations by the University of Cape Town.

This, he said, would help people meet their basic needs and that the proposed wages were an insult to the Marikana workers who lost their lives demanding for a wage increase.

“We are marching to the Western Cape to parliament on the 12th of April to call for a national general strike and we are shutting down everything in the economy,” he said.

Vavi said Saftu would also take to the streets on May 25 and host special May Day rallies where workers would be briefed on how the minimum wage and The Labour Relations Amendment Bill were an attack on their right to strike.

“We are happy that the implementation of this minimum wage has been postponed. We are hoping that MPs would listen to farm workers themselves, domestic workers … and truck drivers and hear whether those workers will ever be happy that their wages must be suppressed in the manner that this national minimum wage is proposing,” he said.

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