Cosatu last week said that if the government did not implement the agreed-to wage increase for public sector workers, the ANC might not get its support in the 2021 local elections. The conflict highlights the tension between Cosatu’s above-inflation demands from a government in a serious financial squeeze and so many other people who have suffered a massive loss of income. 

Cosatu’s president, Zingiswa Losi, said on Friday that their members were tired of broken promises after the government had failed to implement their salary increase. Now they are asking the ANC to intervene. The ultimate threat is that Cosatu will pull away from the tripartite alliance, as the labour federation has threatened to do for more than a decade.

Union members and their leaders may well be frustrated at the government’s attitude to this increase because it has simply not been implemented. And worse, there is silence on the issue from senior officials such as the Minister of Public Service and Administration, Senzo Mchunu.

But Cosatu, unions and even government workers are not the only role-players in this issue.

Two weeks ago, a coalition of organisations involved in education explained that many children were still not getting the food they are supposed to receive under the schools nutrition programme. This has been a problem throughout the lockdown.

At the start of the lockdown (which coincided with a scheduled school holiday), all provinces stopped their nutrition programmes. Then, as the lockdown continued past the holiday period, the Western Cape Education Department restarted its feeding programme, giving children food at schools. It also allowed children to take food home with them for the rest of their families.

It did this in the face of opposition from the teachers’ union Sadtu.

The other provinces came under pressure to do the same, but refused.

Eventually, Equal Education won a court case ordering the nutrition programme to be reinstituted.

But now, millions of children are going to school only every second day or every second week, and they are not getting food on the days when they are not at school.

It is utterly incredible that at a time when widespread hunger is haunting South Africa, when it was known that millions of people would not have an income and millions of families would suffer because of the lockdown, the feeding scheme was not kept running at full capacity, or even upscaled.

This is particularly the case because the cost of the food and of providing it had already been budgeted for by the Department of Basic Education. The money was available.

It is now known that millions of people did in fact go hungry during this time: the research shows that many adults went without food in the evening so their children could have enough to eat.

Meanwhile, the early childhood development (ECD) sector is also struggling.

Crèches provide care for millions of young children while their parents go to work. Often, they subsist entirely on subsidies from the provincial departments of social development. Again, as the lockdown was easing, they were simply not allowed to open. The ministry ignored the sector. Eventually, they also went to court. The ministry revealed its complete indifference to the plight of millions of children by not even bothering to oppose the case or to explain why it had not taken a decision before the case was heard.

Even now, thousands of these institutions cannot open because the provincial departments have not given them their subsidies.

Again, it is hard to explain how it is possible that this can happen.

How can a series of such important decisions be made so badly, how can children be left in a situation that has the potential to stunt them for the rest of their lives?

The answer to this may well lie in what some leaders have called “social distance”. This could be described as the difference between the life that is led by people making the decisions, and those who live with the consequences of those decisions.

To put it another way, it’s the difference between the life led by the minister of social development, and someone living on the social grants for which she is responsible.

Normally the focus of this kind of conversation is around the top leaders of our society and the poorest.

But it may also be that the social distance between those supposed to be providing the service and those who receive it matters. If this distance is too great, the person providing the service fails to realise how important the service is to someone who has nothing.

If they are successful in their demands this may result in more social distance between people with government jobs and people who do not have them. And thus, by implication, more social distance between the government-employed who are protected from an economic meltdown and those who are not.

In the case of school meals, teachers were still being paid during the lockdown and knew that they would be paid during the lockdown. None of their children had to survive on the meals they received at school.

If they had not been assured that their salaries would be paid, perhaps they would have felt differently about school feeding schemes.

In the case of the ECD centres, it may well be that children in the families of those who make decisions about government policy were not in the centres that were closed, but in richer areas where these centres were able to remain open.

The social distance between those employed to provide government services and those who receive them may well be about to increase dramatically.

Cosatu’s demand is that the government honour its agreement to pay increases of above 6%. Inflation is currently running at about 3%.

Meanwhile, millions of people have lost their jobs or had their income slashed as a result of the lockdown. The reaction both to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s economic recovery plan and Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement shows that no one expects those jobs to come back.

The former head of the Budget Office in the National Treasury, Michael Sachs, has warned of “eye-watering” budget cuts to come in 2021. It would appear that some of the departments that are key to ensuring people have enough food, that children are in school and the elderly are able to survive, may lose money.

Yet, in the face of this, unions are demanding that their workers get above-inflation salaries.

The unions themselves are very aware of the optics of their position. For this reason, they are trying to camouflage what they are demanding. Instead of focusing on the financial aspect of their demands, they are trying to claim that they are merely defending the concept of collective bargaining. Their statements talk about how the plan to cut spending on government wages is “an attack on collective bargaining”.

This is because they know that their demands cannot be justified in public, when it is clear that their demands are not about principles, but about money.

If they are successful in their demands this may result in more social distance between people with government jobs and people who do not have them. And thus, by implication, more social distance between the government-employed who are protected from an economic meltdown and those who are not.

This could well lead to more inequality, more social tension, and possibly poorer decisions by the government.

It should not be forgotten that inequality is likely to be the dominant theme of our politics and society moving out of this pandemic and its lockdown. And while increasing social distance between government workers and those who rely on their services would be bad for our society, so would increasing the social distance between those in the middle classes and those with no incomes at all. This may lead to the unions themselves responding to any criticism by repeating their demands for the introduction of a wealth tax.

This, in turn, is likely to be resisted by the middle classes.

All of these scenarios indicate that more tension around incomes and inequality is very likely in the near future. Cosatu’s threat to pull away from the ANC only adds to the existing complexity and tensions in our politics. For a country that desperately needs stability in tormenting times, that is not a good development. DM