In the latest sign of growing frustrations with its ally the ANC over the non-implementation of wage increases for public servants, union federation Cosatu says it will report SA to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for undermining collective bargaining agreements.
The government and labour have been on a collision course since finance minister Tito Mboweni penciled in huge cuts to the public-sector wage bill in his Budget Review in February.
The government later refused to implement the last leg of a three-year pay hike deal signed with public-sector employees in 2018. The matter is now subject to both court and arbitration proceedings.
In a media briefing on Thursday to announce the outcomes of the three-day central executive committee meeting, Cosatu general secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali said Cosatu has elected to stage a sit-in at the Union Buildings on December 4 to demand President Cyril Ramaphosa’s response to a memorandum submitted during the national day of action on October 7. Cosatu had called on the government to respect collective bargaining conventions and to comply with ILO conventions.
SA is a member state of the ILO, a UN agency tasked with advancing social and economic justice through setting international labour standards.
“We shall [also] write to the ILO urging it to immediately register a protest with the SA government’s breach of convention 154, [which is] the right to organise and collective bargaining conventions … The ILO must demand some level of accountability from the SA government,” said Ntshalintshali.
Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi said SA is undermining conventions it is party to. “Any government that undermines any convention must be taken to the ILO. We will do the same with the government of SA,” she said.
Losi said the ILO has a standards committee that deals with countries violating ILO conventions.
“What the committee does is put pressure and give the country timelines to comply. Also it can send missions to the country to ensure compliance with conventions in terms of what the ILO expects,” she said.
“No government wants to be placed before the committee because it’s embarrassing for them to be made to account for violating the same conventions they are a signatory to. Writing to the ILO is a pressure point that we use to ensure there is compliance by the government.”
Workers ‘under attack’
Cosatu first deputy president Mike Shingange said the last time SA appeared before the ILO was during the apartheid era. “Things are this bad that we have to rely on international bodies [to enforce compliance with collective bargaining processes],” said Shingange. He said Cosatu is pursuing the ILO route because workers feel they are “under attack”.
Ntshalintshali said the government’s failure to implement the wage increases is an insult to workers.
“Collective bargaining is a constitutional right, yet this government has gone out of its way to undermine it by abandoning a legally binding agreement and trying to unilaterally impose a wage freeze until 2024,” he said, warning that this will have “huge political costs during next year’s local government elections”.
Cosatu has traditionally campaigned for the ANC during elections since the dawn of democracy in 1994. However, it has since threatened to withhold its support for the coming 2021 municipal elections if the pay hike deal is not implemented.
The union federation also said it deserves answers about the direction the ANC-led government is taking on retrenchments and the public-sector wage freeze.
Said Ntshalintshali, “This cannot be tolerated because the aspirations of the workers and the working class have to be reflected in an ANC government. If it rejects or dishonours these aspirations, it is threatening the very foundations of the [tripartite] alliance and making it redundant and unnecessary.”
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