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Opinionista

Visualising the end of inequality – a new path to negotiation

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Jay Naidoo is founding General Secretary of Cosatu, a former minister in the Nelson Mandela government and is a board member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

Do we live in a world where powerful men in government, powerful men in business and powerful men in army uniforms conspire to smash popular dissent to the growing inequality?

When the Forbes magazine, not the representative of the world’s poor, quotes an Oxfam report, released at the WEF Davos meeting this year, that raises the obscenity of inequality – then it is time the world’s rich and powerful stand up and answer some serious questions.

Is this just a cyclical crisis or is it a systemic one? Are the following statistics driving the crises we face today, from economic to ecological, from financial to food and burgeoning youth unemployment and to the many resource conflicts and corruption scandals that plague our world?

  • Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
  • The wealth of the top one percent – the richest people in the world – amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
  • The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.
  • Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.
  • The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.

There is a growing consensus that the concentration of wealth in the world in the hands of fewer and fewer people is untenable. Thomas Piketty, the world-renowned economist, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, calls it the second Gilded Age—defined by the incredible rise of the ‘one percent’.

Where does the remaining 99% feature in this new age?

I am struck by the ferocious reaction to the Numsa strike. It is described as irresponsible after the economy contracted 0.6% in the first quarter after it was alleged that it was caused by a five-month long platinum miners’ strike. Forgotten is that collective bargaining, which includes the right to strike for a living wage, is enshrined in the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) constitution and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In South Africa it is in the Constitution and has been a cornerstone of the institution of democracy.

Forgotten is the latest employment data, which indicates an unemployment rate of 25.2% in terms of the narrow definition and 35.1% if the broad definition is used. So is the fact that youth unemployment in the 18-35 range is today over 60%. So how has the ratio of dependents to a single breadwinner changed since 1994? I am sure that a single worker is supporting many more dependents than in the Eighties.

Forgotten is the fact that many of our public health facilities are in a state of collapse, with civil society organisations like the TAC reporting in provinces like the Free State that the crisis means some facilities have no equipment and supplies to conduct life-saving tests and monitoring of conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease; stock-outs and shortages of drugs for many chronic conditions such as TB, HIV, diabetes and epilepsy are the order of the day.

The same applies to many of our township and rural schools. The collapse of public services in many areas means that the extended families of workers incur more expenses going to private health facilities or sending their children to former model C schools in cities.

I can empathise when the Numsa president, Andrew Chirwa, says that “Numsa had an obligation to ensure a better standard of living for its members. We have no intention to send South Africa into a recession… but workers are permanently living in a recession even today.”

Similarly, a demand to Eskom for a salary increase of 12% should be seen in a context where there is great speculation on how the budget for the Medupi power station has burgeoned from R52 billion in January 2007 to an estimated R145 billion with an overall delay of 48 months today.

How have the companies such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, providing engineering and project management support; Hitachi, supplying the boilers; Alstom, providing the steam turbines; construction companies Murray and Roberts, Basil Read and Aveng; ThyssenKrupp Materials, handling contractors of the coal stockpile yard, benefited?

Can we have a public audit of all these companies, including those whom they have paid, and the names of the shareholders? Many want to know how public money is spent and whether part of that could have gone into improving the workers’ wages and working conditions.

Workers in SA live in townships like Bekkersdal or Alexandria, in the heart of the richest real estate in Africa. I have been there. It will break your heart: the poverty, the overcrowding, the battle for survival. These residents feel left behind by democracy, surrounded by piles of garbage, exploding slums and dysfunctional schools and clinics.

Families of the poor don’t want charity. They do not want a scenario of 1 in 3 South Africans living on a social grant. They want the dignity of their labour. Their desperation, as they fail to meet the obligations of a breadwinner, drives wage pressure and is reflected in high levels of alcohol, drug abuse (which leads to high levels of interpersonal violence), the spike in youth delinquency, amongst other indicators.

We have to redefine our growth path, our governance and our democracy. True democracy must be built through open societies that embrace the rule of law and where public institutions protect the interests of citizens. Our struggle for freedom was a struggle to have a voice. If avenues to free and open dialogue and meaningful participation are closed off and people lose trust in public institutions, then collective bargaining will become politicised.

That’s what happened in the past. I see it happening again. The strikes and protests we see sweeping South Africa reveal a fault line in our society – between a small insider elite and the majority. Our new battle is against inequality, lest we forget the fact that the Gini Coefficient (a measure of inequality) reports the stark statistic that SA is today the one of the most unequal countries on Earth.

This is the time for a new dialogue in South Africa. A roadmap back to the contract we made with our people in 1994 to “deliver a better life” to all our people, based on our Constitutional commitment to human dignity and justice.

There are tough choices we need to make, before it is too late. DM

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