Message from President Mokaila about the new Federation<\/p>\n
The challenges facing the public sector unions and employees in South Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n Since its establishment, the National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers (NUPSAW), has remained and advocated for union independence and it is therefore not surprising that the majority of workers in South Africa are realizing this as the weakest link in the trade movement, hence the envisaged formation of an independent trade federation culminating in the Workers Summit in Birchwood in Johannesburg.<\/p>\n The Public Sector unions in the 21st<\/sup> century in South Africa, just the rest of the world, are faced with enormous challenges as they try to adapt to the constantly changing work environment and the effects of world economic globalization. Below are just some of the few challenges faced by the public sector movement and possible solutions to remaining relevant to the workers\u2019 demands and expectations.<\/p>\n Retrenchments and unemployment<\/strong><\/p>\n Retrenchments and increasing unemployment to potential job seekers in the public sector have become a permanent feature of the South African market.<\/p>\n According to Statistics SA, the official unemployment rate in 1994 stood at 22% and has since increased to 25% up until 2014. South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. These figures refer to the percentage of the workforce that is unemployed but willing and able to work and actively seeking employment.<\/p>\n Massive resignation from the public service<\/strong><\/p>\n Thousands of public service employees have resigned from the public sector in 2014 and early 2015 in response to the government\u2019s envisaged proposed pension fund reforms. Although the government has since backtracked and postponed them due to pressure from unions, we feel that this is not enough and the possible pension fund reforms must be totally scrapped and not reintroduced after the general elections when the government knows that it would have been brought back into power.<\/p>\n Below, we have sampled just one district in the North West Provincial Department of Health to highlight the number of resignations against new appointments for the financial year 2015\/16.<\/p>\n This scenario illustrates to us that the higher the number of unemployed and job seekers, the lesser the chances of public sector unions growing.<\/p>\n Overall, the government services shrank by 0.8% in the first quarter of 2015, largely as a result of these resignations. Members in the SAPS, education and health sectors, in particular, resigned in order to withdraw their pension contributions. These resignations had a negative impact on the economy as a whole and on the union membership in particular.<\/p>\n On the other hand, departments are consistently being restructured and the pressure to rationalize even further the public sector is likely to rear its ugly head over the years to come. And as unions, we will lose some of our benefits over the coming years and therefore a decrease in membership resulting in weakened bargaining power.<\/p>\n While it is true that unions are primarily concerned with the bread and butter issues of its members, there is a growing concern that unions should start focusing on the contemporary environment such as the overall national development process. Unions should consolidate past achievements and channel more resources in strengthening their status and role as partners in the socio-economic transformation of society.<\/p>\n Internal organizational cohesion and training<\/strong><\/p>\n Trade union organizations should embark on organizational revitalization with particular attention to human resource development in order to strengthen their capacity to deal with the complex nature of issues of socio-economic management in which they crave a meaningful role. The biggest challenge is of capacity nature and concerns the alarming rate of leadership depletion over the years. Trade union leadership has been seriously depleted as a result of a number of factors, including retrenchment, promotion, and retirement. Thus the need for training of union leaders at both local and national levels cannot be overstated. This type of training needed is technical in nature and will greatly assist and strengthen the technical competencies of the emerging leaders in order to effectively participate at the enterprise level and in dealing with national issues.<\/p>\n Our biggest downfall as labor is that for a very long time we have entirely relied on the employer to give us training albeit not adequate. The recent comments by the Minister of Police are very disturbing as he went against the recommendations of academics and researchers on the improvement of training for police officers. During the recent commemoration service held in Pretoria of police officers killed he said that they unanimously agreed that training must and will be given top priority and went further to say that police training, like any science, was always under construction. We are saying that training should be more than firearm handling and wearing bulletproof vests.<\/p>\n We, therefore, want to echo the sentiments of SAPU in which it calls for the review of the Criminal Procedure Amendment Act as statistics show that one police officer is killed every ten days. SAPU has highlighted that under the current section 49 of this act, police lives will continue to be at risk. We are very disappointed that the police ministry, therefore, decided to reduce the duration for police training from two years to just under eight months and feel that it is inadequate as they have not stated what it will entail.<\/p>\n Sustainable employment<\/strong><\/p>\n The fastest period of public sector employment increase was during 2009, immediately following the global financial crises. The impression created here would be that the state possibly acted as an unintended creator of jobs during a period of extreme labor market distress. In one conception, we could argue that the post-2000 period has generated new labor elite in the market, namely the non-unionized public sector. We really need to tap into this potential market and swell our numbers because the union power is all about numbers. We need to beat COSATU in this game.<\/p>\n The biggest feature of the public sector market is the relative increase in unionization, which is often associated with a wage premium. The rise in public sector unionization is commensurate with the increased public sector employment. Public sector trade unions are likely to dominate union membership in South Africa in the future. However, we need to caution that this is no cause for celebration as the largest job growth was in the category that is classified as unskilled and semiskilled workers instead of creating sustainable jobs with a decent living wage.<\/p>\n But the steady rising membership for low-income members in public sector unions which does not look sustainable, together with the growing political influence of these unions, these results possibly allude to the role played by unions in driving higher returns for their members in the post-2000 period. This pattern of wage returns potentially suggests segmentation between unionized public sector workers versus all other formal, non – agricultural workers.<\/p>\n There is also the government Expanded Public Works Program (EPWP), launched in 2004 which has focused on providing temporary income relief through the creation of jobs for the unemployed and unskilled instead of creating meaningful permanent employment. Public sector unions in South Africa face the biggest challenge in their history. The government is being forced to cut back public spending because of austerity measures in the rest of the world. We are increasingly facing a decrease in retirement age and thereby creating anxiety and panic with regard to the recent pension reforms for public servants.<\/p>\n Currently, as labor, we are battling with the government to recognize community caregivers in the health sector as employees and afford them a salary instead of a stipend. We will continue to fight and ensure that they are regarded as permanent employees with all the benefits and not as volunteers as they have consistently been exposed to all the dangers, including contracting diseases from the very community they diligently serve as they are not even given protective clothing. Higher skilled jobs have also contributed to public sector job growth.<\/p>\n A need for a single public service<\/strong><\/p>\n The then Minister of Public Service and Administration, Ms. Lindiwe Sisulu proposed in 2013 that there should be a single public service that will serve all equally, including local government and municipalities. We also affirm the call that South Africa is a unitary, sovereign state and the benefits of a single public service would be immense. Currently, the disparities that exist between public sector employees and government at local government or municipalities allow for unfair competition rather than collaboration. Poaching from supposedly same staff pool hinders stability and adversely affects the delivery of government mandate to its citizens, hence a lot of unrest by communities for better services.<\/p>\n Salary disparities are huge and result in tension and conflictual brain drain within a system that is supposed to serve the same people and derives its mandate from the same source. As far as bargaining is concerned, the status quo will remain with the emphasis more on sectoral councils and there will be harmony with regard to pension schemes and medical schemes to name just a few. Training opportunities that are accessible through the Public Administration and Management Academy would also be available to municipal employees.<\/p>\n Powerful unions are often associated with creating a wage premium for their members. This is based on their ability to mobilize industrial action and negotiate in favor of their members during the times of wage negotiations. It would appear that the distinction between the public and private sector, in terms of earnings and employment is a new form of segmentation which has evolved in the post-apartheid South African labor market. Study shows in the health sector, doctors are leaving to join the growing private sector because of unusually low salaries, lack of resources and poor working conditions.<\/p>\n Outsourcing and labor brokers<\/strong><\/p>\n Since this is a cross-cutting issue, we still need as labor to collectively intensify the fight on labor brokers to be completely banned as regulating private and temporary employment agencies does not address the abuse of workers\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n Corruption by government officials<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the biggest challenges facing public sector unions is corruption. It has manifested itself into outsourcing and contracting out services through tenders which create a fertile ground for corruption and poor service delivery. We should also as a matter of urgency prioritize fighting corruption from within our own labor movements by office bearers who abuse union resources and behave as if the unions are their fiefdoms. As a result, both the trade union movements and South Africa have been shaken by a spate of poor service delivery at shop floor level and local government level for many years and both union office bearers and councilors continue to ignore the members and the masses as they put party politics above people interest.<\/p>\n Organizing among the outsourced workers has greatly weakened the unions as these workers are unable to plan for the future and therefore see no reason to join trade unions. Another challenge is that there are too many public sector unions fighting to capture the few workers that are being employed to a point that unions seemed to concentrate their resources on union on union rivalry rather than the employer and thereby weakening the power of unionism and losing focus of their core function and mandate. Maybe we need to carefully restructure our own unions.<\/p>\n Political independence<\/strong><\/p>\n Trade unions and federations in Africa and particularly in South Africa have a long tradition of political engagement, beginning with their involvement in the anti-colonial movement through to present day struggles\u2019 for democracy. There is a rich history against anti-colonialism where close ties were developed between the trade union and the national liberation movements. Trade unions, while being important actors, usually played the role of junior partners to political parties, without developing an autonomous social agenda outside and beyond the struggle for political independence.<\/p>\n We should also closely examine the changing relationship between the trade union movement and political parties by asking questions such as the following;<\/p>\n Trade unions in post-colonial Africa have, until recently tendered to rely heavily on alliances with ruling parties in trying to influence public policy. This preoccupation with political parties has, for example, led to the divisive involvement of members in trying to influence succession plans for their political parties and thereby splitting unions and federations as a whole into different camps down the middle and limiting their power and losing focus of the core functions of the unions. Many affiliates become divided into warring camps because of a breakdown of trust between leadership and this opens the door for breakaway unions.<\/p>\n We have seen here in the South African case where COSATU is aligned to the ruling party but seems not to retain any considerate autonomy and little influence on government policies. This unhappy marriage where labor retains an uneasy alliance with the governing party has brought misery and hardship to the workers with union officials being seeing as selling out the workers at the expense of cabinet posts. To some federations, the formation of a Labor Party directly linked to the trade union movement is therefore seen as the only natural means by which trade unions can influence politics. However, as evidenced by some of the SADC countries, this experience is somewhat difficult. While attempts by labor to form political parties have taken place in both Zimbabwe and Zambia, they have not led to enduring relationships and neither has the state is willing to tolerate such a relationship.<\/p>\n It is also clear from the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Zimbabwe that forming a political party is a difficult choice to make and even in Zambia. Trade unions have been disappointed with the performance of the ruling parties and have been dumped by the very same government they helped to bring into power. In the South African situation, the majority of the workers seemed to owe their existence and allegiance to the ruling party to a point that the mere thought of forming an alternative political worker party would be like betraying the founding members and struggle icons of the liberation movement like the late Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\n Although COSATU has formed a tripartite alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP), the federation has greatly lost influence on policy formulation and is no longer regarded as the champion for workers\u2019 rights. This has been seen in the number of PSCBC resolutions that they signed which had no positive impact on the workers and was then seen as rubber-stamping government decisions.<\/p>\n This alliance to political parties by COSATU has often seen them playing the kingmakers and influencing policies negatively to the detriment of the very same workers they claim to be representing even to a point of not seeking for a mandate. Recently we have seen a party that would do everything to protect an individual at the expense of the country and disregard the fact that the Constitutional Court has pronounced that he deliberately flouted the very oath that he took as the President of the country. It, therefore, stands to reason that a lot of trade unions in Africa are rethinking their approach to politics, a rethink in which federations and unions rely less on their alliance with the ruling party to focusing on building coalitions with NGOs and other interest groups to push for an alternative agenda by the government.<\/p>\n What is clear from the above is that labor alone in Africa does not have the capacity or the programmatic vision to provide an alternative to this phase of market-driven politics. Labor Federations also need to develop new partnerships with research entities and universities to engage and contest the neoliberal ideas that have become the dominant paradigm in the international financial institutions as in the prevention of the privatization of state infrastructure. The power of labor does not only lie in its strategic location in the workplace and its capacity to mobilize and organize, but also in the power of ideas and its ability to present ideas that challenge market-driven development and provide alternatives that point towards a more labor-friendly global order.<\/p>\n In coming to the end, the question that all of us need to ask is; \u201cPublic sector unions, will they thrive or struggle to survive in the future\u201d? Public sector unions cannot continue to act in isolation from the private sector labor movement, for both ideological and practical reasons. Ideologically, all unions are tied together by the objective of securing workers\u2019 rights in society. Practically, there are benefits associated with inter-union collaboration. A stronger labor movement increases the ability of public sector unions to influence public policy and budgetary decisions at all levels of government.<\/p>\n A need for an independent federation<\/strong><\/p>\n As the public sector faces different threats in the 21st<\/sup> century, public sector unions are uniquely positioned to turn challenges into opportunities and develop a new model of unionism that will prepare labor for yet another future<\/p>\n However, the answer to all these problems lies in the formation of a strong independent Federation which has historically been seen as central to the creation of a democratic order. Labor in Africa has been at the forefront of the struggle to maintain democratic institutions and democratic rule. Vibrant, militant, radical, worker controlled and independent trade unions and Federations, it can be argued are the most important bulwark against authoritarianism, fighting corrupt government and a government that has ceased to listen to and care about its workers and which puts profit above the very same people who toil in appalling conditions to keep it in power every five years through elections.<\/p>\n So, the time is ripe to form a Federation that will listen to the workers and shape the policies of the country to be worker friendly and that will be people controlled and not by a few foreign people like the Gupta family is controlling the rest of the 56 million South Africans. It is, therefore, time to forge ahead with the establishment of a new Federation along with these and other principles.<\/p>\n Amandla!<\/p>\n[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”7″ display=”basic_thumbnail”]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Message from President Mokaila about the new Federation The challenges facing the public sector unions and employees in South Africa Since its establishment, the National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers (NUPSAW), has remained and advocated for union independence and it is therefore not surprising that the majority ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":530,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["entry","author-leon_sanders","post-720","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/720\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nupsaw.org.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\n
\n Category<\/strong><\/td>\n Resignations<\/strong><\/td>\n Appointments<\/strong><\/td>\n Difference(Actual Loss)<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Doctors<\/td>\n 166<\/td>\n 146<\/td>\n 20<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Nurses<\/td>\n 328<\/td>\n 86<\/td>\n 242<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Allied Health Professionals<\/td>\n 167<\/td>\n 88<\/td>\n 79<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Admin\/Support staff<\/td>\n 1037<\/td>\n 04<\/td>\n 1033<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n TOTAL<\/strong><\/td>\n 1698<\/strong><\/td>\n 324<\/strong><\/td>\n 1374<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n \n