COSATU rejects the National Treasury’s statement on the exclusion of public servants from pension withdrawals
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has noted with alarm the National Treasury’s announcement that public servants will be excluded from any pension funds withdrawals. While this outrageous statement is unacceptable, we are not shocked by such blatant provocation of public servants coming from the National Treasury.
The Federation has consistently identified the National Treasury as the chief bastion of resistance in government against the progressive socioeconomic policies. These are the same people who have spent the better part of the last two decades pursuing wrong-headed and cartoonish ideas to try to fix the economy.
The Federation rejects this unwarranted isolation and victimisation of public servants. This represents an intensification of the offensive against public servants by this administration.
Retirement savings are hard-earned deferred wages of workers, and the National Treasury is ill-qualified to tell workers that they cannot access them while experiencing financial difficulties. This arrogant statement is tantamount to the infantilization of workers. Workers do not need to be lectured by ineffectual government bureaucrats about their money.
For the last two decades they have proven themselves to be immensely incompetent and have mismanaged the economy to the ground. The mess we are in was caused by their misguided policy choices.
COSATU in making this proposal to social partners at Nedlac, last year, was informed by the depressing levels of indebtedness faced by many workers and households in South Africa.
According to the Debt Counselling Association, about 10 million people in South Africa have bad debt, meaning they have missed three or more monthly repayments. These people have an average of eight loans each. On average people in bad debt spend 63% of their after-tax income on repayments.
According to the South African Reserve Bank, almost 73,7% of households’ income is spent on debt. At the same time consumer spending contributes 60% to the economy. Last year the SA Human Rights Commission revealed that more than 50% of South Africa’s credit-active consumers (19 million) were over-indebted.