Cosatu, a key ally of the governing ANC, is gearing up for its national strike against corruption, job losses, retrenchments, gender-based violence and attacks on collective bargaining.
“The federation is issuing a call to all workers and South Africans to join the strike on Thursday. They can either join the planned activities across the country or withdraw their labour by staying at home on the day,” said Cosatu national spokesperson Sizwe Pamla.
The Cosatu strike comes as SA’s biggest trade union, National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), embarked on an indefinite national strike on Tuesday, in support of its demand for above-inflation wage increases in the steel and engineering sector.
Pamla said the protected strike was focused on pushing the government and private sector to fix the economic mess the country was in. The embattled economy has been battered by Covid-19, with GDP declining by about 7% in 2020 and leading to a loss of about 1.4-million jobs.
The pandemic also resulted in huge corruption in the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE), with the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) investigating more than R13bn worth of PPE tenders.
“The biggest huddle in fixing SA’s myriad problems is the inefficiency of the state and the scourge of corruption in both the public and the private sector,” said Pamla. “Corruption in the private sector has seen price gouging in many sectors of the economy like retail and pharmaceutical sectors, therefore, compounding existing inequality and poverty.”
He said Cosatu would demand that the private and public sectors “stop the attacks that are directed at workers” through undermining collective bargaining.
“We want the reversal of budget cuts that have led to an unacceptable wage freeze in the public service, the disintegration of the CCMA and retrenchments in state-owned companies,” said Pamla.
Cosatu public sector unions approached the Constitutional Court in September after the labour appeal court, in December 2020, upheld a Treasury decision not to implement the final part of a three-year public-sector wage deal, at a cost of R38bn, for lack of money.
The wage bill has been increasing exponentially over the years, escalating from R154bn in 2006/2007 to R518bn in 2018/2019. It increased to about R630bn in the past financial year.
The government’s proposed reductions to the wage bill, as highlighted in the 2021 Budget Review, amount to R303.4bn from 2020/2021 to 2023/2024.
“All this pulling back on spending by government at a time when there is a downturn in the economy exposes the fallacy of the Treasury’s claim that it is pursuing a countercyclical fiscal policy — by which it means that when growth is strong government reduces spending or saves so that it can spend aggressively when the economy is declining,” said Pamla.
“It’s a fallacy because the current economic decline calls for an aggressive fiscal stance, as reflected in the fact that gross domestic expenditure and household consumption are at their lowest since 2011, real unemployment stands at 45%.”
The Cosatu strike on Thursday also come as finance minister Enoch Godongwana is scheduled to deliver his maiden medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS) in November.
“If there is no change in the country’s economic policy direction, the already low standards of living of working people will deteriorate significantly. More livelihoods will be destroyed by the resultant deepening turmoil,” said Pamla.
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