No integrity in Cosatu’s job growth document

Appeared on IOL – October 6, 2010

By Jonathan Yudelowitz

TO GAIN converts leaders must ensure that promises correlate with reality. This demands integrity: honestly reviewing how new ideas compare with existing ones; matching one’s own willingness to sacrifice, change or contribute with what we ask others to do or relinquish. Integrity inspires trust and stimulates the opening of minds to realities and new possibilities.

The tone of Cosatu’s Growth Path Towards Full Employment invites serious debate and consideration. But it lacks integrity.

The document is vocal on how business and government must change but silent on how Cosatu can transform to support the role it claims in guiding the economy. It doesn’t acknowledge the failure of its previous big idea of tripartite economic co-determinism, enshrined in our labour relations framework, Nedlac and sectoral bargaining.

Since its inception Nedlac has contributed nothing, and the sectoral councils are overseeing the wholesale shedding of jobs, especially in troubled sectors like the textile and apparel industries.

Despite its transformational rhetoric, the labour relations framework has served to entrench vested interests of big business and big labour. It has failed to deal with post-1994 changes to our labour market, and suggestions to address rural or youth unemployment that could compromise union domination are quashed.

The key to competitiveness is the flexibility to cope with the seasonal swings in market demand. Labour brokers responded effectively, providing many citizens with a foot in the door of employment.

Cosatu calls labour brokers modern day slave traders, begging the question as to why they have not been brought before the SA Human Rights Commission, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration or the courts. After all, workers use these channels in order to protect and assert their rights.

The real reason for Cosatu’s anger is that labour brokers threaten its hegemony.

The abolition of labour brokers could cost our economy and erode the advances made in the construction, postal services, retail and hospitality industries.

As Ethel Hazelhurst pointed out in Business Report (September 27, 2010), Cosatu demands the lowering of food and electricity prices, yet it will not admit its well-above-inflation wage increase demands contribute to these prices.

Cosatu upholds the legal right to strike but disrespects the right not to strike. On Radio 702, a National Education, Health, and Allied Workers Union leader rationalised the death of infants during the hospital workers’ strike but when a toyitoying striker had a seizure, Cosatu saw no hypocrisy in seeking medical attention.

Cosatu dismisses the idea that jobs are more likely to be secured if businesses negotiate with their own workers, which would make employee morale and productivity a competitive advantage. Instead it insists on bargaining by sectors, which caters for the lowest common denominator and doesn’t recognise that living costs and employment choices differ widely.

The unemployment crisis is being perpetuated by ideological assumptions and vested interests.

To face our dilemma-rich reality, the first step is to connect ideology to promises, plans and then to results, and review these against assumptions so the system can learn. This will demand leadership from all sides – the unions, big business and the government – characterised by integrity and responsibility.

Jonathan Yudelowitz is a management consultant and joint managing director of YSA.

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