Zwelinzima Vavi's address to SACTWU National Bargaining Conference, Durban, March 4 2011
National Office Bearers of SACTWU
Members of the National Executive Committee
Leaders and activists of the union at all levels
Delegates to this Bargaining Conference
Dear Comrades
Thank you for inviting me to address this extremely important conference. It is always a pleasure to meet members of SACTWU, one of COSATU's most loyal and militant affiliates. From the days of Solly Sachs to the time of Violet Seboni, SACTWU and its predecessors have been resolute defenders of workers' rights to a decent wage, safe and healthy working conditions and fair and equal treatment.
Your union must also be congratulated for being a pace-setter in promoting your members' wider interests - providing bursaries for higher education for members and dependants, organising a Worker Health Programme Service that provides confidential counselling and testing for members and their dependants.
You have provided education to 174 080 members on HIV/AIDS and sectoral issues. You have promoted skills development, and launched a home-based care programme, a primary school programme that empowers teachers and promotes reading and numeracy in elementary schools and winter schools to help matric students with their schooling.
You have also been one of the most successful affiliates in recruiting new members, despite the loss of jobs which I am just coming to. SACTWU is also leading the field in promoting gender equity. You have 53% women branch office bearers, 58% women regional office bearers, and 27% women in your regional executive committees.
Comrades
This conference is meeting at a critical time for clothing, textile and leather workers. We are just starting to emerge from a devastating job-loss bloodbath in the wake of the worldwide recession. From the beginning of 2009 to the end of 2010 we lost 1.17 million jobs, plunging 5.85 million more family members of those jobless workers into the ranks of the poor.
And no workers have been hit harder than your members. In just three years, from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2010, 18 291 clothing sector jobs were lost. Between 1995 and 2010, the SA textiles, clothing and leather industry lost more than 120 000 jobs!
Your union faces in the most brutal fashion the crisis confronting all workers, with unemployment at the official level of 25.3%, and the more realistic expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those who have given up looking for work, at 36.6%. In Limpopo Province this expanded figure for unemployment had reached 45.6%, almost half the workforce!
Unemployment remains far higher than in any comparable country.
As a result, millions of South Africans still live in poverty, squalor and disease. 1.875 million families still live in shacks. The majority of people are denied quality education for their children in our public schools, or decent healthcare in our public hospitals, while a small, mainly while elite can pay for world-class educational and healthcare services.
Inequality has worsened to the point where it is now the widest in the world. The workers' share of national income was 56% in 1995 but by 2009 had declined to 51%. There is no official poverty line for South Africa, yet the Minister of Finance has acknowledged that 50% of the population lives on 8% of national income.
Meanwhile the number of South African billionaires has nearly doubled, from 16 in 2009 to 31 in 2010, when the country's 20 richest men enjoyed a 45% increase in wealth. Pine Pienaar, CEO of Mvelaphanda Resources, made R63 million in 2009, which means he earns 1875 times as much as the average worker.
On average the poorest 10% of earners get R1275 a month, which is 0.57% of total earnings, while the top 10% get R111 733, which is 49.2% of the total!
As I said at the COSATU 25th anniversary celebration in December, "The legal minimum rate for qualified clothing machinist is non-metro areas such as Newcastle, Botshabelo and Qwaqwa is R479 per week. In reality many employers in those areas pay between R250 and R280 per week. The employers of small and big companies continue to make mega profits. Their life of opulence explains our life of misery. For many hours and often in sweatshop conditions we put in hard work to meet impossible targets our bosses impose on us."
These are statistics which we must keep in mind at all this year's bargaining conferences. How dare these super-rich CEOs and their lackeys in the DA, the universities and the media, lecture us on ‘excessive' wage demands. Any increase at or below the rate of inflation will leave our members no better off and will actually increase the wealth gap. 5% of R63 million is far more than 5% of these SACTWU members' wages!
Comrades
Alongside the massive levels of unemployment, is a continuing shift from permanent to casual, insecure and temporary employment. The number of workers employed by labour brokers has risen to 6.8% of total employment, with a disastrous effect on levels of pay, job security and benefits for hundreds of thousands of workers.
The bosses are ranting about our ‘inflexible' labour laws and the unions' stranglehold on the labour market. They like labour broking so much because it relieves them of the responsibility to respect workers' human rights, treat them decently and comply with the labour laws.
Many want to pay the ‘market' rate of wages rather than sit down and negotiate in bargaining councils. They are trying to blackmail workers with the argument that if you don't want to work for what we are offering, there are thousands of others out there desperate for a job at any price.
Trade unions can never submit to this kind of blackmail by employers who seek to exploit the desperation of the unemployed. SACTWU has suffered more than most from this. You handed over your 2010 "Worst Employer Award" to the Newcastle Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry, because its clothing employer members continued to disrespect our country's labour laws and paid clothing workers at levels far below the legally prescribed minimums.
I was very pleased that your Congress last year spelt out that "a new growth path for decent work in the industry cannot be based on slave wages and certainly not on a deliberate and disrespectful disregard for our country's labour laws".
Fortunately our allies in the ANC and government have rejected such arguments, and are committed to prioritise decent employment. There is now consensus that the levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality are a major national crisis. As we heard in both the State of the Nation and Budget speeches, the creation of decent jobs is the top priority for government and labour.
That is why we have welcomed the important debate around the New Growth Path, which aims to create five million new jobs by 2020. Its authors agree with COSATU that the main reason why we have failed to create jobs is not ‘excessive' wages and ‘inflexible' labour laws, but our failure to escape from an economic structure which we inherited from the days of colonialism and apartheid of an over-dependence on the export of raw materials, like gold, platinum, iron ore, coal and diamonds.
We have to start to use these resources to convert into manufactured goods here in South Africa, and place our economy on a sustainable foundation of manufacturing industry.
We are already working with government and business through Nedlac to take forward those aspects of the National Growth Path which can be implemented quickly, particularly filling vacant posts in the public service and finding ways to use unemployed workers to improve service delivery to our communities.
Meanwhile we shall be engaging with government on some of the NGP's problematic areas. We have to convince the ANC and government that we will never come near to creating five million new jobs if we continue with the Treasury's cautious and conservative fiscal and monetary policies.
These have made our unemployment even worse, and will continue to put the brakes on growth and job creation unless we can win the argument and convince government to adopt the strategy we have outlined in COSATU's ‘Growth Path for Full Employment'.
It argues that the roots of our continuing inequality and poverty lie in the failed economic policies adopted in 1996 - the misnamed Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy. It led to growth at a snail's pace, higher unemployment and it only redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich! It was a policy based on the misguided free-market, neoliberal policies of the ‘Washington consensus' which led directly to the devastating worldwide economic crisis of 2009.
We have to make a decisive break with these disastrous policies and go back to the principles of the 1955 Freedom Charter, the 1994 RDP strategy, the 2009 ANC Election manifesto, and the 2010 IPAP2 Document, which, in its own words, "represents a significant step forward in scaling up our efforts to promote long-term industrialisation and industrial diversification beyond our current reliance on traditional commodities and non-tradable services."
IPAP2 aims to build on and broaden interventions in sectors which were identified in the first Industrial Policy Action Plan, including clothing, textiles, footwear and leather. It will "result in the creation of 2 477 000 direct and indirect decent jobs over the next ten years. It will diversify and grow exports, improve the trade balance, build long term industrial capability, grow our domestic technology and catalyse skills development".
We also welcome the additional funds set aside for incentive support for the clothing, textile, footwear and leather industry, as mentioned in Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan's Budget speech, and the proposed increases in the Clothing and Textile Production Incentive, from R400 million in 2010/11 to R600 million in 2011/12 and R750 million in 2012/13.
We also welcome IPAP2's commitment to bolster the domestic economy through procurement reform. For clothing, textile and leather workers this is a life-and-death issue. Unless we can drastically cut back the flood of cheap imports from countries like China which pay poverty wages to their workers and deny them basic trade unions rights, our jobs are doomed.
That is why you are absolutely right to throw your weight behind the campaign against Walmart's takeover of Massmart. As well as being a viciously anti-trade union employer, Walmart is notorious for sourcing its products from wherever they are cheapest, with no concern for the wages and working conditions of the workers who produce them, or workers elsewhere whose jobs could be lost.
Comrades
In May we have the Local Government elections. COSATU and SACTWU are fully committed to ensuring sweeping victories for our ANC allies across the country. We are already hard at work building and consolidating support.
Any workers thinking of voting for the DA, should remember what their spokesperson Tim Harris has said about jobs in your sector - that SACTWU, the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry and the Minister of Labour are an ‘anti-jobs triad', who are looking to urgently shut down 385 factories and eliminate 9 500 jobs in Newcastle.
The Democratic Alliance, he says, "believes that the only way out of this standoff is to strictly enforce minimum standards for working conditions, but amend the wage model to take account of differing conditions across South Africa". So their election campaign amounts to "Cut your wages! Vote DA!"
We should also bear in mind DA policy on Export Processing Zones, which it has been pushing as job creation opportunities since 2002. SACTWU has rightly condemned these both on economic and social grounds. The ‘footloose' investors which EPZs attract neither develop the national economy nor create sustainable development. On the contrary they undermine the local economy as a result of dumping of cheap products through ‘leakages'.
Our task in the election has been made harder by the remarks by chief government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi, in a TV interview as President of the Black Management Forum, when he said that "there is an over-supply of coloureds in the Western Cape" and that "they should spread in the rest of the country".
COSATU and SACTWU have condemned such remarks as racist and unacceptable. They fly in the face of the commitment of the country, the ANC and its allies to a non-racial society, in which the rights of all citizens are protected by our constitution and laws and must be treated with respect and dignity.
The remarks will further inflame fears within the coloured community, raised by Solidarity's false and provocative suggestion that amendments to the Employment Equity Act will lead to a million jobs for ‘coloureds' being taken over by Africans. COSATU has already condemned Solidarity and its allies in the DA for this attempt to turn ‘coloured' voters against the ANC.
We welcome the statement by the ANC disassociating itself from Manyi's remarks and the reassurance that there is no threat to discriminate against the ‘coloured' community and that the government is committed to protect and advance their interests.
I wish you a very successful bargaining conference.
Issued by COSATU, March 4 2011
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