COSATU CEC on health, migration and the economy
Statement of the COSATU Central Executive Committee meeting held on 23-24 November 2009
The Congress of South African Trade Unions held a scheduled meeting of its Central Executive Committee on 23-24 November 2009, attended by the COSATU National Office Bearers, provincial leaders and representatives of the 21 affiliated unions.
The CEC passed its deepest condolences to the family of one the stalwarts of the trade union movement, the founding 1st Deputy President, Chris Dlamini, who passed away last week.
The meeting was addressed by three cabinet ministers, all of whom spoke very frankly about the problems they are facing, in the new spirit of open debate which has characterised the new government and the alliance in recent months.
Transformation of health
In the face of the worsening health challenges - demonstrated by the fact that South Africa now is amongst the 10 countries in the world who have worsening infant mortality rate as well increasing number of people who die as a result of HIV/AIDS and TB - we invited the Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi to have a conversation with him on the challenges of transforming South African healthcare.
We are saddened by the statistics presented by the Minister that demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that we are losing the battle against HIV/AIDS and TB. This reality includes the following:
1. The average antenatal prevalence is 29.3%
2. Four districts recorded HIV prevalence above 40%
3. HIV/AIDS prevalence continues to be worse for young women aged 25 - 29 years, at 32.7%
4. In 2006, 59.3% of deaths (6 out 10) were deaths of those younger than 50 years
5. 57% of deaths of children under the age of 5 during 2007 were as a result of HIV
6. The Independent Electoral Commission reports that between 1 September 2008 and 31 August 2009 a staggering 396 336 people were removed from the voters roll.
7. Home affairs death registrations figures also show a similar trend of deaths
8. 22 071 people died of TB in 1997 in 2005 that number reached a staggering 73 903
9. The estimated number of South Africans with TB in 2007 is 481 584, which is 1%. 28% of all people who have TB in the world live in South Africa and yet South Africa population is only 0.7% of the world population
COSATU calls on its 2 million members and society at large to fully participate in the 16 days of activism against children and women abuse. We are aware of the embryonic relationship between violence and abuse of women and children and HIV/AIDS epidemic.
We reiterate our call that the only effective way of stopping this carnage is prevention. We need a massive change in behaviour and attitudes, especially the youth. We need unprecedented voluntary counselling and testing. We call on our members to follow our example. During the CEC most of the CEC members voluntarily tested not only for HIV but also for a range of other diseases.
We share the Minister of Health's concern that our challenges of healthcare go beyond the funding problems. Yes certainly funding must be increased, in particular as we move forward to a National Health Insurance scheme. Yet South Africa spends more of its resources on health than many other poor countries who spend much more, yet have better health outcomes than South Africa. Quite clearly the South African health challenge includes ensuring that every cent spent on health makes a contribution to building a healthy nation.
We are fully in support of government's ten-point plan for transformation of the healthcare system. In the coming months we shall work much more closely with the Ministry of Health to take forward the ten-point-plan, which we fully endorsed.
1. Provision of strategic leadership and creation of a social compact for better health outcomes
2. Implementation of National Health Insurance
3. Improving the quality of health services
ü Cleanliness
ü Changing attitudes
ü Safety of patients
ü Eliminating long queues for admission
ü Infection control
4. Overhauling the healthcare system and improving its management. This will help to ensure that primary healthcare facilities such as clinics are revitalised
5. Improving human resources for better planning development and improved management
6. Revitalisation of infrastructure
7. Accelerating implementation of the HIV and AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections national strategic plan 2007-2011 and increasing focus on TB and other communicable diseases.
8. Mass mobilisation for better health care for the population
9. A review of drug policy in order to have access to cheaper medicines
10. Strengthening research and development.
We fully endorse the theme for this year World AIDS Day on 1 December 2009, which states:
I am responsible
We are responsible
South Africa is taking responsibility
Engaging with the new Migration policy
In the wake of the wave of community service-delivery protests, which are about specific local grievances but are also related to the structural problems in the economy, the CEC invited the Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Nkosazana Zuma, to share with the CEC her thoughts about how we respond to the new challenges we face at the migration policy level.
The community service-delivery protests are a sign that the patience of increasing numbers of poor working class communities is running thin. They are facing a huge squeeze in the former black-only residential areas. It is massive unemployment and grinding and humiliating poverty when they can see across the road that the grass is green.
There are an estimated 3 million Zimbabweans who are equal victims of mismanagement of the economy and political system competing and with better education sidelining and regrettably dragging the basic protections of workers' rights down. They combined with thousands from everywhere else in the world who had come under a mistaken belief that South Africa was a land of milk and honey.
The CEC has in the past discussed the reasons behind the continuing xenophobic attacks on foreign national in particular those of African and Asian origin. COSATU has repeatedly condemned these attacks as barbaric and a source of untold embarrassment to one of our founding principles - the principle of international worker solidarity.
Minister of Home Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, spoke on the major problems facing her department. One is the continued issue of illegal IDs and passports, which has raised fears in other countries that South Africa is a weak link in the fight against terrorism. This seriously blemishes our country's reputation and could have serious repercussions.
Another huge problem is corruption in Home Affairs, in both front and back offices, often facilitated by ‘agents' who are paid to bribe staff to issue bogus documents. There is a generally poor level of service, with a lack of a culture of work and service, and managers who cannot manage. She gave examples of lazy and disrespectful staff even when she herself made unannounced visits to offices.
There is also still a problem of people who have no birth certificates and whose names are not on the population register. The department is campaigning for all over-16s to apply now for birth certificates and IDs, but aims, as soon as possible, to have all citizens registered at birth.
The Minister made it clear that turning round Home Affairs is a task for the whole nation, of which COSATU is a very large part, and she urged the unions to support her.
The Minister's biggest problem is the large and growing number of undocumented immigrants, who continue to flood into the country. They include people claiming to be asylum seekers, though in reality hardly any of them qualify as such, but are economic refugees seeking work in South Africa.
A particular problem is the exploitation of illegal immigrants by unscrupulous employers, particularly in the farm, construction and hospitality sectors, where employers cut wages and worsen working conditions.
Employers blame South African workers for not accepting the terms they are offering, but South African workers have every right to refuse to work for low wages or in bad conditions. The unions cannot be expected to agree to a worsening of the already low level of wages.
At worst, this competition for scarce jobs and resources can lead to violent conflict with local workers who are competing for the same jobs, as recently in De Doorns.
The CEC shared the Minister's concerns and agreed that poor service cannot be tolerated. Home Affairs can help by resolving long-outstanding wage disputes and reducing the wage gap within the service, so that pay reflects responsibility.
The meeting agreed that we have to continue to fight xenophobia, which the Federation has always strongly opposed, especially given the number of union members who have for decades come from neighbouring countries, including many of our most senior leaders. We must counter the false arguments that unemployment and lack of services are the fault of immigrant workers.
South Africa can never survive as an island of prosperity in a sea of poverty. The solution has to include developing all Southern African economies. The developmental policies for strong industrially based economies that we are demanding for South Africa must be implemented across the continent, so that migrants no longer need to flee to South Africa.
The CEC agreed to discuss the matter further and hold a workshop with the department to seek solutions.
Transformation of the economy and trade and industry policy
We noted that the Stats SA Labour Force Survey revealed that the number of the employed people fell by a staggering 484,000 in the third quarter of 2009. This increased the country's official unemployment rate from 23.6% in the second quarter to 24.5% in the third.
These are official figures that do not count those who have given up looking for a job. When we count the real unemployment, it climbed from 32.5% to 34.4%. But of particular concern is that the manufacturing sector, which should be an engine of growth and job creation, shed 150,000 jobs, equivalent to 8% of total jobs for the industry. Wholesale and retail trade lost 110,000 jobs.
A staggering 4.192 million South Africans are now without work. And that rises to 4.702 million if you add the 510 000 who have given up even looking for a job or have opted out of the labour force completely.
The worst mistake we can make is to continue only blaming the international economic crisis for our woes. Yes it is true that failure to regulate the financial institutions and the massive inequities worldwide is largely responsible for the crisis. But in South Africa we have been in any case sitting on a ticking bomb since the 1994 democratic breakthrough.
We inherited a disastrous growth path from the apartheid era - a commodity-based economy, which is anchored on capital-intensive sectors of the economy. We have done little to tamper with this apartheid growth path and economy. This phenomenon of inheriting colonial growth path, based on the extraction of mineral resources to build industrial power in the north countries, is one of the most fundamental mistakes most of the so-called ‘free' Africa has made.
To add salt to the injury we adopted inappropriate macroeconomic policies. The underlying cause of the crisis now ravaging the working class communities is the mistaken policies between 1996 and 2004, of cutting tariffs and privatising basic services, conservative fiscal and monetary policies pursued in those years, centred on the pursuit of the misguided belief in inflation-targeting and appeasing narrow interests of financial markets in particular.
COSATU tirelessly pointed out that this would simply worsen our already critical unemployment, poverty and massive inequalities. These warnings in the past fell on deaf ears. The chickens are now coming home to roost.
We invited the Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Rob Davies, to share his plans for turning the economy around and embarking on a new growth path.
The CEC noted new data on GDP released by Statistics SA for the third quarter of 2009, showing that the SA economy has grown by 0.9% on a quarter-to-quarter basis, but nevertheless continues to be declining at a rate of 1.8% on a year-on-year basis.
Whilst many interpret these results with an air of optimism, the CEC cautioned that this release coincides with the data revisions that such statistics are subjected to once every five years. It therefore remains to be seen whether such a quarter-to-quarter growth is a statistical artefact, reflecting the rebasing of data from 2000 to 2005, or whether it reflects the underlying turning point in the volume of production.
Even if the 0.9% growth rate reflects the underlying turning point in the volume of production, the CEC notes that the large declines of 6.4% in the first quarter and 2.8% in the second quarter are yet to be reversed so that we can declare that we are back out of a recession. The economy has yet to regain the levels of production that would have materialised had the crisis not occurred before we can truly say we are out of the crisis.
We have lost 959 000 jobs in nine months. This 0.9% growth rate will not cancel that. The likelihood is that we will see more than 1 million job losses this year. Even when the economy grew by nearly 6% we never witnessed unemployment declining below 23%. This is what we call a structural unemployment crisis. More of the same medicine will not solve this crisis. We need a complete overhaul of the economy.
The CEC further noted that government has been slow to respond to the recession particularly to implement the Framework Agreement as SA's response t the global financial crisis. Because of the long-standing nature of the vulnerabilities we face, the CEC has resolved that in the course of the recovery, policies must be in place to ensure that the composition of growth, employment, and the allocation of credit are altered and that our economy must be oriented towards the promotion of regional African economic development.
The CEC welcomed the efforts that are currently underway to formulate a concrete industrial strategy supported by an appropriate trade policy, and noted that these efforts should be undertaken in an integrated manner, so that all policies are articulated coherently to produce outcomes of an equitable growth and development path oriented towards decent employment creation.
The CEC intends to engage vigorously in policy discussions. Specific mention must be made of the need for a clearly articulated growth and development strategy. We shall formulate a framework document outlining the key features that should define the new growth path.
This framework document will also articulate key policy shifts to support such a growth path. In particular, the framework document will outline policy positions on exchange rate management, interest rate policy and inflation control. The CEC welcomed the undertakings by the Finance Minister Cde Pravin Gordhan and the new Reserve Bank Governor Cde Gill Marcus, to open the discussion on macro-economic policy.
The framework document will also articulate the Federation's position on the spatial development strategy, the centrality of the link between agriculture and industry, the key policy levers that can be deployed to achieve the objectives outlined in the document, amongst other issues.
The central message of the CEC is that the overall recovery of the economy cannot occur in the context of old policies that have failed to deliver sustainable livelihoods and industrial structure. The current crisis represents an opportunity to engineer a new growth trajectory and to shift policy. A recovery without appropriate policies to promote decent work will place us on the same apartheid growth path that has generated widespread vulnerabilities.
Statement issued by COSATU, November 25 2009
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
Services Subscribe to newsletters News feeds
|
||||||||||
Facebook
Google
Laaik.it
Yahoo!
Digg
del.icio.us
Comments
1. Abandon Inflation Targeting
2. We need a weaker rand to promote exports
3. We need a stable Rand to create certainty for exporters.
4. A move away from a commodity based economy
What I dont agree with is that :
We need . .more
by Brennan on November 25 2009, 18:18
Find this comment inappropriate? Report it
The Cosatu statement includes the following [true] observation:
"They combined with thousands from everywhere else in the world who had come under a mistaken belief that South Africa was a land of milk and honey...."
The ANC has . .more
by JVR on November 26 2009, 05:17
Find this comment inappropriate? Report it