The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) rejects with utter disdain the Chief Executive Officer of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA), Ms. Busisiwe Mavuso’s shocking attack on Transnet’s employees, and in fact all workers’ hard won constitutional rights to unionise and collective bargaining in her “weekly newsletter”. If BLSA did not claim to speak on behalf of Organised Business and represent an important stakeholder at Nedlac, we would be content to dismiss these as odd rantings best ignored. Unfortunately, they represent a shameful call to government to not only undermine Transnet’s employees’ fundamental constitutional and labour rights but are an incitement to the state to break the law.
Ms. Mavuso is aggrieved that unions at Transnet, SATAWU and UNTU, have represented their members, utilised legally established collective bargaining procedures provided for by the Labour Relations Act and negotiated with their employer and signed a three-year wage agreement, including 6% for the current year. Yet this is precisely what unions are meant to do!
The BLSA CEO is horrified by the unions’ temerity for negotiating a CPI plus 1.5% increase. Again, the horrors! Ms. Mavuso seems strangely unfamiliar with the nature of wage negotiations and how inflation is calculated for these. Union mandates from workers are to protect wages from being eroded by inflation. The inflation rate utilised is for the previous year, which in this case was 4.5%. Negotiations take into account that inflation hits low-income workers hardest as the goods they spend their wages on increase at levels far above CPI, e.g. electricity, petrol and food. No doubt Ms. Mavuso negotiated similar increases for herself.
Ms. Mavuso has demanded government reign in the unions at Transnet and suppress workers’ rights to collective bargaining. It is beyond hypocritical that BLSA sees fit to extol the virtues of the Constitution and demand its full protection for the rights of business owners but abandons any sense of principled leadership when it comes to demanding the same respect for workers’ constitutional rights.
Whilst the BLSA CEO’s comments are offensive to workers, the more worrying aspect would be if government were not led by a sober President and Ministers for Transport, Employment and Labour, and this inflammatory call to violate the Constitution were acted upon by government, Transnet or other employers. It would deny workers’ their rights to negotiate solutions to their needs and threaten labour market stability.
A business leader with experience in creating and running successful enterprises would appreciate that staff are any workplaces’ most important asset and a happy, respected employee is the key to their success. A worker whose rights are abused and their need for a living wage suppressed will not be productive. Active unions which represent workers and help find solutions to grievances are key to labour market stability.
One imagined the CEO of BLSA would be familiar with the many success stories of partnerships between Organised Business and COSATU, and indeed Organised Labour, at Nedlac and in numerous joint interventions to save local jobs and businesses. In the past few years these social compacts between COSATU and Organised Business have seen the Edcon deal to save 140 000 clothing and retail jobs, the Eskom debt relief package to enable it to end loadshedding, the UIF COVID-19 TERS releasing R65 billion to help 5.7 million workers, numerous buy local campaigns, engagements to extend the AGOA favourable tariff access to South African and African exports to the United States, and more recently the Two-Pot Pension reforms putting R44 billion into the pockets of 2.4 million workers.
It is a pity BLSA’s CEO chose to scapegoat workers at Transnet for its problems yet seemingly has little knowledge of the challenges facing this critical State-Owned Enterprise and thus the solutions required. It is not workers who unleashed the decade of state capture and corruption at this SOE, nor is it workers who run the sophisticated copper and other metals syndicates stripping its infrastructure. Neither is it workers who appointed incompetent management, nor neglected investments in its infrastructure and machinery. It’s not workers who negotiated the dodgy deal with Chinese railway corporations that were then ensnared in outstanding taxes and a reneging of commitments to supply spare parts and repairs. Fixing these is precisely what needs to be done to stablise and rebuild Transnet, not dumping the bill for state capture and mismanagement upon workers struggling to cope with the rising costs of living and take care of their families and unemployed relatives.
It would be more productive if the CEO of BLSA took time to engage unions on the challenges facing workers and solutions to turning the economy around. It would be equally refreshing for Ms. Mavuso to use her pedestal to ask why her private sector constituents are content 31 years into democracy for 60% plus senior management positions to be held by White men, who constitute less than 4% of society. It would be inspiring if BLSA could provide their plan to address the obscene apartheid wage gap deeply entrenched across the private sector where CEOs of mining, banking, financial, retail and other companies make more in a day then many of their employees make in a year! Perhaps as we prepare for the National Dialogue, BLSA will swap this ill-considered rant by their CEO for some long overdue introspection.
Issued by COSATU
Matthew Parks (COSATU Parliamentary Coordinator)
Cell: 082 785 0687
Email: matthew@cosatu.org.za