COSATU is shocked and totally condemns Pick n Pay’s retrenchments plans
COSATU is shocked by the recent reports by Pick n Pay that it is planning to cut 10% of its workforce. This means that up to 3 500 jobs will be lost and thousands of peoples livelihoods will be compromised. This is regrettable considering the fact that the country is grappling with the highest unemployment rate since 2003.
The federation is worried that the economic recession and a crisis of profit is being used by many of these companies to retrench workers and erode workers’ rights.
While there are many reasons for our economic woes one of the reasons that is hardly mentioned is that the private sector has been on an investment strike and amongst their complaints is the lie that labour laws are over-protecting workers.
This is not true when considering that the labour market has been in a recession since 2009. The unemployment rate has hovered around 25% for more than 7 years and vulnerable non standard employment e.g casualisation and short time have been on the rise.
COSATU will therefore resist attempts to use the recession to lay off workers. This economic recession shows that we cannot use the economy which is based on unrealistic free market economic principles to solve the issue of poverty, unemployment and income inequality.
We need more government intervention in the production of goods and services to ensure that more workers are not excluded from participating in the economy.
In response to the recession the government should increase funding to the “training of layoff schemes” and provide funding to worker cooperatives to take over closed factories or those in liquidation/insolvency. It should also nationalise companies in key sectors of the economy in order to retain skills and jobs. We also want to see the infrastructure projects used to create decent permanent jobs.
COSATU is also reiterating its call that retrenchments need to be made a matter for negotiations rather than consultation and this means changing the process in Section 189 of the LRA from one of “consultation with the aim of reaching consensus” to one involving negotiation. We acknowledge that changing Section 189 will not solve South Africa’s unemployment problems because this is an economic problem, but the fact is that dismissal for operational reasons is far too easy.
Employers fail to fully canvass the possible alternatives to job losses and they take little, if any, responsibility for the social costs associated with the dismissals. Employed workers must, however, bear the brunt of stretching their meagre wages to cover more and more unemployed dependants. Sometimes the retrenchments are purely motivated by extracting greater profits rather than saving an ailing business. Going forward, we shall be challenging the employer’s substantive decisions to retrench instead of only quibbling about the procedural issues during retrenchments.
COSATU does not believe that the actual decision to retrench is, or should be, construed as a matter of pure managerial prerogative; and this means that we will work to expand the notion of substantive fairness.
We are continuously pushing forward with the call for a Jobs Summit because we believe that there is a need for a pact covering jobs, income and prices. The current economic programmes and policies do not promote large scale absorption of the labour force. We still reiterate our call for the Labour and Economic chapters of the NDP to be reviewed because we feel that they are not adequately equipped to help us create the much needed jobs. The federation has identified job losses as one of the issues to be resolved if the country is to maintain a stable social order.
A long term solution will be to replace our market based economy with an economy that is owned by workers instead of a privately run economy which is anti-working class and anti-poor and places profits above all needs.
Statement issued by Sizwe Pamla, COSATU national spokesperson, 31 July 2017
