COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi's address to SACCAWU's National Bargaining Conference, 18 July 2012, Centurion
National Office Bearers of SACCAWU
Delegates
Guests
Comrades and Friends
Thank you for inviting me to address this very important bargaining conference. On behalf of COSATU's National Office Bearers and 2 million plus members, I bring greetings and best wishes for a very successful meeting.
First of all, let me wish our iconic leader, Comrade Madiba, a very happy 94th birthday and more years of health and happiness, which no one has done to more to earn. As we debate today, and every day, we must never forget what we learned from him about building a non-racial, non-sexist democracy.
The coincidence between this Bargaining Conference with the Mandela Day should spur us into using not only 67 minutes, as we will do today, but to live in his heroic image every day. The best way we can do that is to ensure that we live the life we saw throughout his 67 years of total commitment to our struggle for freedom. That includes ensuring that we root out the conditions of slavery that many workers in the retail and wholesale industry work under.
We must all strive to live a life of humanity, love, integrity, selflessness and sacrifice, be willing to serve without expecting anything in return, committed to unity, peace, and to make our country and the world a better place.
Happy birthday to our icon and father and may he live longer enjoying his time with his family!
Comrades
SACCAWU has for years militantly defended and advanced the interests of one of the most exploited sections of the working class. For decades your members have suffered severely from low pay, casualisation, anti-social hours and abusive and racist bosses.
We have a huge national crisis of poverty and inequality but nowhere is this more graphic than in the wholesale, retail, catering and hospitality sectors, where the gulf between those at the top and bottom of the ladder is wider than anywhere else.
Your members toil for as much as seven days a week at all sorts of anti-social hours, struggling to get to work early in the morning and risking travelling home late at night - and all for poverty pay. The minimum wage in the wholesale and retail sectors at present range from between R2006 and R2299 for a general assistant to between R4469 and R5489 for a manager.
And shop-workers know better than anyone how difficult it is to manage on such low wages, when every day you yourselves put up the higher prices of basic goods on the shelves, as well as the ever-increasing cost of electricity, petrol and transport fares.
Yet while struggling to survive on such low wages, you are expected to keep smiling cheerfully all day at the customers in the shops, restaurants and hotels. How difficult it must be to smile, knowing that you going to leave behind all that you so desperately need in your house, only to face hungry children.
On the other hand your employers have very good reason to smile. In no other sector is the gap between the living standards of the workers and their employers as massive. Look no further than one of your newest employers - Walmart, the world's biggest company - with 2.1 million workers in 8 500 stores in 15 countries.
Its Chief Executive, Mike Duke, earned $18.1 million (around R145 million) in 2011. This is down a little from the $18,7 million (R150 million) he earned in 2010, which was 900 times more than the $20,744, which is the average that their ‘associates' - as Walmart call their workers in America - earned in that year.
Some of his South African counterparts are smiling even more. Recently retired Pick n Pay CEO, Nick Badminton, left the company with R18,643,400 in his pocket, and in 2010 Shoprite CEO Whitey Basson took taking home a staggering R627 530 000 in salary, perks and share options, the highest-ever monthly earnings ever recorded in a single year.
If these employers think you will accept any wage increase below inflation, they are dreaming. You need that much just to stay where you are given the soaring prices. But with such levels of inequality, you will be absolutely justified to demand real, above-inflation increases to start to narrow this vast gulf between you and your employers, and COSATU will back you to the hilt.
Comrades
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for the long and hard battle you waged against the decision of the Competition Tribunal to approve the Massmart-Walmart merger. We are still convinced that this was a serious error, not just for your members but also for workers in South African manufacturing sectors and for the country as a whole.
The Competition Act requires the Tribunal to consider the public interest effects of a proposed merger - whether it promotes employment and advances the social and economic welfare of South Africans - and not just the narrow interests of the firms who intend to merge, but it did not do so.
Walmart's application should have been judged against the background of the job-loss bloodbath which has hit the country in recent years, with unemployment today standing at 36, 6% by the more realistic expanded definition.
As the three government ministers who called for a review of the Tribunal's ruling, said: "the Walmart acquisition of Massmart can have a potentially devastating effect on local jobs". We should not forget the comment by Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, that "already olive farmers in some parts of the country have been advised that they should no longer expect orders from Makro for locally-produced olive oil, as they intend to import cheaper products".
As a giant in the retail sector, Walmart bullies farmers, manufacturers, distributors and suppliers to push down their prices. This has led to the collapse of many small and sometimes even big businesses. A study by UNI Global Union showed that every retail company operating within a five-kilometre radius from a Walmart store has simply closed business.
In South Africa this will threaten the future of big retail shops such as Shoprite and Pick n Pay and SMMEs owned by emerging black entrepreneurs.
As you know well Walmart is notorious for its anti-union attitude and its ruthless approach to keeping down wages. Its induction training devotes as much time telling workers how bad unions are as on training them on health and safety. Where workers do get organised, as in the US and Canada, it simply closes down the store or department.
It has refused to sign a global agreement with UNI Global Union to set fair standards for worker and union rights to organise and negotiate collective agreements. It faces numerous class action lawsuits, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers for, among other things, not paying overtime, gender, racial and other forms of discrimination.
We congratulate SACCAWU for standing firm against any attempt by Walmart to try to use these tactics here!
Comrades
As we approach our National Congress in September we are reviewing all our policies. We are presenting for discussion a comprehensive political, socio-economic and organisational report.
The Living Wage Campaign must be the cornerstone of the work of the trade union movement, to mobilise workers to fight poverty, close the apartheid wage gap and address broader inequalities in our society.
I am happy that you going to have a focused discussion on the discussion paper we have produced to help facilitate debates at our 11th National Congress - ‘Towards new collective bargaining, wage and social protection strategies', which, among many issues, raises the following:
- A legislated minimum wage across the board to set the minimum living standards
- Regulation of executive pay to close the apartheid and gender pay gaps.
- Disclosure of company profits, executive pay and bonuses
- Guaranteed decent employment by the state
- Improved collective bargaining arrangements
As we have said in our Living Wage Campaign Conference last year, the Campaign must also look at the social wage, to fight for decent and affordable housing and access to land, quality healthcare through the National Health Insurance scheme, free, universal and quality public education until university level, cheap and efficient public transport and affordable basic services.
The campaign must also target changes in labour legislation so that maternity and paternity leave are fully paid and that workers are not disempowered and denied the right to strike because they belong to "essential services", defined in a way that could cover all public service staff.
But the most urgent part of the campaign must be to achieve the banning of labour brokers and an end to the casualisation of labour. We are continuing to argue at Nedlac and must be ready to take to the streets again. We will never give up on this fight to put a stop to this human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
We are going to this congress with a string of victories under our belt. They include the fact that following the mother of all demonstrations on the 7 March 2012, the ANC have agreed with us that all the anti-worker legislative proposals that emerged from the department of labour should be withdrawn.
The only area of difference on labour broking now is that the ANC still insist on protecting a triangular relationship for the first six months of employment. We argue that one day is a day far too long under the enslaving human traffickers. We see no role whatsoever for a third party in a relationship that should exist between the worker and the employer. If we can't resolve this during the forthcoming public hearings on the proposed amendments, you should stand ready to defend your demand for a total ban of the labour brokers.
As part of preparing for debates at our congress we have just concluded a Worker Survey and the 2012 COSATU Affiliates Survey. We have already held three policy conferences on Gender, International and Education and Skills Development Conferences.
The Congress, and the affiliates as they prepare for it, must however move beyond mere rhetoric about the evils of unemployment, poverty and inequality but ask searching questions about why, 18 years after the democratic breakthrough, we still have such huge problems.
The ANC tried to answer this same question at its recent Policy conference. Regardless of the quibbling about wording, the commitment to a second phase of the transition was a recognition that nearly two decades after our political liberation from apartheid dictatorship, we have failed to liberate the majority of South Africans economically from poverty and inequality. A new revolutionary struggle must be therefore be waged to create the kind of just and equitable society envisioned in the Freedom Charter.
What the ANC, SACP and COSATU itself must now debate is the content of that revolutionary struggle, and how we as organisations have to change our ways if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It is our strong view that unless our leaders and every cadre of the movement find ways to transform our economy and adopt a new mindset, our national democratic revolution is in danger of being derailed.
That is why the 11th COSATU Congress, the last before 2015 - when the targets set in the 2015 Plan adopted in 2003 should be reached - is so important. We shall have to make a rigorous assessment of our successes and failures, look critically at the role of the Alliance partners and the trade union movement itself.
Just as we said in relation to the ANC, we need a mindset change, but before we can do that we need to ask why, just three years before 2015, by when we should have four million members, we are only just over half way there. We have to ask why there are so many small breakaway ‘independent' unions springing up.
SACCAWU and other affiliates need to ask why so many workers in their sectors are not members. Are we becoming office-bound trade unions, hoping that workers will come to us rather than going out to recruit them? The starting point for a patient, if the treatment is to work, must be to admit that all is not well.
We must probe whether we are not falling victims of the same disease we have identified in the ANC - of our noble values and traditions being eroded by factionalist battles and unending leadership schisms, which pose a stumbling block to building a movement that our forbears would be proud of.
Are our leaders so well paid that they can use private healthcare and education, and drive their fancy cars, and are simply not aware of the catastrophe in the public healthcare, education and transport services?
The same applies to the scourge of corruption. COSATU has been in the vanguard of the fight to root out the corrupt elements that are hell-bent on hijacking our movements for personal gain. We have set up ‘Corruption Watch', as a concrete way for us to play an active part in the battle. Together we must hunt down culprits, regardless of their political affiliations or political and economic connections.
The politics of patronage, corruption and greed has destroyed the ethic of self-sacrifice and service to the people that has characterised the revolutionary movement. The dangerous growth of factionalism is increasingly not about ideology or political differences, but about access to tenders.
The worst problem of all is the emergence of death squads in several provinces linked to corruption and the murder of people who have blown the whistle. There is a real danger that if all this continues, the entire state and society will be auctioned to the highest bidder, and we shall be on the slide towards a corrupt banana republic.
That is why we are so pleased with the guilty verdict and sentences handed down to the murderers of Comrade Moss Phakoe, who bravely fought to expose corruption in Rustenburg. I hope that this marks the turning if the tide in the fight to prosecute and punish those guilty of such crimes.
Again, however, we must not flinch from asking whether this disease has not spread into the trade unions. Are we sure that no officials or shop stewards are receiving bribes from employers as the price for negotiating sweetheart deals? Are we confident that none of the trustees of our provident or investment funds are taking a slice of your money for themselves?
I have absolutely no doubt that the overwhelming majority of our leaders and officials, just as with our public representatives and officials, are honest, hard-working and committed servants of those they represent. That is all the more reason to weed out the rotten few who are not.
Comrades
As our Workers' Parliament draws nearer we must seize the opportunity. We face unprecedented attacks from the employers, who are desperately trying to cut their wage costs through such devices as a youth wage subsidy or lower wages for new entrants. They continue to casualise jobs and demand the weakening of the ‘inflexible' labour laws to make it even easier to hire and fire us - as if it was not already far too easy!
We will not let them get away with any of this. We must go on a counter-offensive to give workers more protection against exploitation and victimisation. Decent work and a living wage are not negotiable; they are necessities!
Issued by COSATU, July 18 2012
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