While waving banners and shouting slogans to say that it supports the poor and wants to end unemployment, COSATU has fought a long and successful war against the poor and the unemployed. Its one-day shutdown last Wednesday, in the separate company of its enemy federation, SAFTU, is just part of this war, although on the day not a very successful part.
The fact that South Africa now has catastrophic unemployment, a stagnant economy, declining industry, collapsing infrastructure and appalling education for most children, is in considerable part because of COSATU and SAFTU.
Suppose you were an investor overseas, wondering whether to invest in a factory in South Africa employing a thousand local people. Would the sight of COSATU’s national protest make you more or less likely to invest? If you were a South African manufacturer wondering whether to employ more people or become automated and employ fewer people, which way would the COSATU strike make you turn?
The massive contradictions between what COSATU wishes and what its demands would bring, were on display in the posters it brandished on Wednesday. It wants more employment and it curses private employers. It hates capitalism and demands capitalists invest more money here. It wants to end unemployment and demands a R12,500/month minimum wage, which is guaranteed to push our unemployment towards Zimbabwean levels (about 90%).
It attacks the failure of the state-owned passenger rail (PRASA) and the state-owned electricity company (Eskom) and demands that neither should be privatised and that, on the contrary, successful private industries such as SASOL should be nationalised (I did not see a poster reading “We demand that SASOL should be run like PRASA!”). It wants us to fight for the nonsense of “climate justice” which means reducing CO2, but then demands lower fuel prices which would increase CO2.
COSATU has long been in the tripartite alliance with the ANC and the SA Communist Party. They all have the same ideology, which is Marxist state control and African nationalism. Their heroes are bourgeois white men such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, who never worked in a factory in their lives and regarded the working classes with patronising contempt. They all support the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), which wants to make South Africa an African Marxist state with no private property ownership – except of course for the ruling elite. Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC), which Robert Mugabe deployed on the Zimbabwean farms to thunderous acclaim from the ANC and which President Ramaphosa loves so much, is part of the programme. They all collaborated on our job-destroying labour laws.
The ANC, together with the trade unions, coerced the big private corporations into determining wage negotiations through bargaining councils with statutory powers. The aim of these councils is to shut poor people out of the economy and to smash the small employers. Big business and the big trade unions came together, without any reference to small businesses or to the unemployed, and set wages and conditions of employment at such high levels that the small businesses cannot meet them, and so prospective small businesses cannot start up, and existing small businesses are shut down and unemployment grows. The alliance dislikes all business but particularly hates small business. This is because big businesses, which are politically cowardly, and often woke, have enough money to suffer the destructive follies of the ANC and the unions. Small businesses do not. They are too busy trying to survive and trying to pay their workers.
Suppose Mr Nkosi, a small businessman making warm clothes and blankets in a township factory, offers Mr Sithole, an unemployed man with an unemployed wife and a small child, a job at R3,400 a month. Mr Sithole is delighted. This job would give him dignity and self-respect, and allow him to feed his family – giving him far more money than he would get from the social grant for his child. But it is below the minimum wage of R3,500 and so would not be allowed. The rich and the powerful, who make our laws and run our government would prefer Mr Sithole to starve to death. I’ve asked this of many academics and politicians (all earning large salaries): Why do you think it is better for Mr Sithole to starve rather than earn R3,400 a month? Why do you think you have the right to tell him what to do with his own life? I’ve never received a good answer. The worst answer is that we need restrictive labour laws and minimum wages “to protect the workers’ hard-earned rights”. Pardon? The “hard earned rights” of those with jobs to make those without jobs starve? The ‘’hard earned rights” of the rich and the powerful to crush the poor and powerless?
The betrayal of ordinary black children is perhaps the greatest crime of the ANC and the unions. South Africa spends a fortune on education, far more than other countries with comparable economies, and yet her education system is an utter disaster for most of her children. The primary reason for this is the SA Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), one of the largest and most important members of COSATU. SADTU controls education in most provinces. Its teachers only care about improving their own conditions and nothing about the welfare of the children they are paid handsomely to teach. Its teachers are often under-qualified, seldom put in the proper hours of teaching, and neglect their pupils in favour of trade union meetings or demonstrations. They are often appallingly bad teachers and they don’t care. The great majority of South African school leavers do not have even the most basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic that primary school pupils have in other countries, including other developing countries. This is the main cause of our calamitous shortage of skills, and a reason for our high unemployment.
Both the ANC and Cosatu are perfectly aware of how SADTU is ruining our schools. Neither the ANC leaders nor the SADTU teachers would dream of sending their own children to schools run by SADTU. They would be horrified at the thought. There is evil hypocrisy here. In 2017, then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa made a glowing speech to SADTU, praising it to the heavens. He made jolly sure that his own children went to posh private schools far, far away from any SADTU influence. (His sons went to St Stithians.) I saw that SADTU was heavily present at Wednesday’s shutdown. As usual they thought the political demonstration was more important than the education of their pupils. No doubt they had first ensured that their own children were chauffeured to private or Model-C schools before they came.
The latest employment figures from Statistics SA show that unemployment now stands at 44% (including those who have given up looking for work). Significantly, there was an increase in employment in community and social services and a decrease in manufacturing. This shows the direction of the SA economy. The ANC and the unions will see to it that fewer and fewer people work in industry, and more and more work in social services. De-industrialisation might not be official ANC policy but it is certainly actual policy. Engineers, technicians and artisans had better emigrate now if they can.
The Cosatu-Saftu one-day shutdown was nominally in protest against the declining economy, rising prices and falling living standards. Some commentators said it was actually about union rivalry and warnings to the ANC to take them seriously. The leading figure in the shutdown was Zwelinzima Vavi, leader of SAFTU, formerly an officer of COSATU. Vavi is probably best remembered for his incendiary part in the security workers’ strike of 2015, where 57 people were killed (which compares with the 34 mineworkers shot dead by police at Marikana in 2012). I don’t know what Vavi’s politics are, but I see he has a R3 million house in Sandton. So he’s probably a communist.