COSATU's response to Adcorp Employment Index
The Congress of South African Trade Unions condemns the misinformation being peddled in the Adcorp Employment Index, which purports to show that 108 000 jobs were created in March, an increase of 84 000 from the February figure.
While COSATU will welcome any genuine good news on job creation, we cannot take these ‘findings' at face value, because Adcorp - a firm of labour brokers - is not an impartial analyst of the employment scene but a role player within it.
It is playing political and self-serving games around the unemployment crisis by publishing figures which cannot be verified objectively to back up its political views. We shall therefore wait for the more reliable figures from StatisticsSA before claiming that the unemployment tide is turning,
The federation's scepticism about Adcorp's ‘research' is reinforced by its bizarre ‘findings' about the unions. Without any attributable source, the report claims that "since 2006, trade unions have lost 129424 members, with total membership falling from about 3,5-million to roughly 3,3-million which translates to a loss of R95 773 760 a year in membership dues."
This certainly does not apply to COSATU-affiliated unions which on average are still growing, despite the global economic crisis and the accelerating casualisation of labour.
If other unions are losing members, then the Adcorps of this world must take a big share of the blame. One of our reasons for demanding the banning of labour broking is that it, and other forms of casualisation, make it far harder for workers to exercise their constitutional right to join a union.
When workers do not have a permanent workplace and are dependent on labour brokers, many of whom are anti-union, it can be very difficult to join and remain active in a trade union. Casualisation makes it easier for employers, especially labour brokers, to keep them unorganised and exploit them more ruthlessly.
Even more suspicious is Adcorp's ‘finding', again without a shred of evidence to back it up, of "low participation in strikes, with only 1.4% of members turning out for strikes since 2006, with attendance ranging from 0% to 8,8%".
The idea of a strike involving 0% of the workers is mind-boggling and casts serious doubt on all the other ‘findings'. Ironically, if there is any truth at all in the assertion that so few workers are involved in strike action, they should inform their fellow capitalists who constantly get hysterical about the alarming increase in strikes!
Unemployment is a massive national crisis and COSATU is doing everything possible to bring it down. The trade unions are playing their role in promoting a new growth path, infrastructure development and other programme which will create jobs. Labour and the other three Nedlac constituencies have entered into agreements with government departments, and have signed accords, which will help us to play our full part in creating 5 million new jobs by 2020:
- The Basic Education Accord, premised on the realisation by every stakeholder that our education system is not producing expected results from Grade 1 to 12, which will in the long run have a negative impact on job creation and the economic future of the country.
- The National Skills Accord, aimed at expanding and improving training.
- The Local Procurement Accord, in line with the goals of the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP 2).
- The Green Economy Accord, signed on 17 November, timed to coincide with the 17th Conference of Parties on Climate Change taking place in Durban, which has a rich potential to create more jobs and create a healthier world.
This is the responsible approach to the problem, in sharp contrast to Adcorp's point-scoring and issuing of bogus statistics to create the illusion that there is a simple quick-fix solution, a solution which of course involves promoting labour brokers like themselves, weakening the trade unions and further undermining the already limited protection workers get from the labour laws.
Statement issued by Patrick Craven, COSATU national spokesperson, April 12 2012
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