Like fish stranded by a fast retreating tide, most mainstream economists, commentators and governments tend to be flapping around frantically and aimlessly, unaware of the real cause of their distress.  The  more cautious among them hope for a slow return of the tide;  most merely hope against hope that somehow, sometime, all will return to what it was.  It almost certainly will not.

Nobody saw it coming.  This is an oft repeated mantra about the global economic crisis, which is also — and equally erroneously — referred to frequently as a financial crisis.  But it is certainly true that most mainstream economists and commentators continued to talk up the economy even as the first serious signs of collapse became evident.  And most also tended to refer to it — at least initially — as a purely financial affair.

They did so out of an almost religious belief in the market and, in most cases, an obvious absence of knowledge about economic history.  Clearly blinded by the chimera of Stock Exchanges and the smoke and mirrors of booming futures and derivatives trading, they lost sight — if ever they had it — of the real productive economy.  Their god was profit and their church, the market.

So when the economic bubble began to deflate, punctured by what was an effective pyramid scheme based on sub-prime mortgages in the United States, they did not question church or deity;  the search was for individual sinners, those who had abused the rites and rituals that they believe guarantee profits ever after.  So instead of rational appraisals, there were frequent outpourings of dogmatic incantations and calls for regulatory patches to repair the sub-prime hole that had begun deflating the economic bubble.

And there is the continued insistence by any number of economists and commentators that the crisis could not have been foreseen;  that its precise cause and probable consequences still remain a mystery.  But this is simply untrue.  For 20 years and more, the warning signs have existed — and have been pointed out, although usually from the more radical margins of economic debate.

However, even that standard bearer of free market capitalism, The Economist magazine, warned in 1999 that the spectres of over-capacity and over-production were haunting the world economy.  A survey by the magazine of international demand, supply and capacity resulted in the conclusion that a time of glut leading to stagnation, was on the cards.

This was something that had been pointed out even earlier by the likes of economic historian Robert Brenner in the United States.  He was not alone.  Economic commentator T. N. Vance in the US was raising warnings in the 1950s and the so-called oil price crisis of 1973 led to a veritable flurry of analysis on the margins of economic debate, illustrating what probably lay in store.

However, these commentators and economists not only looked to productive capacity and the related sources of supply and demand in the world economy, they based their analysis on the much earlier work of Karl Marx and his collaborator, Frederick Engels.  In 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that the then relatively new capitalist economic system needed to expand its market globally;  it needed to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”.

It was a system, they wrote, that has “conjured up such gigantic means of production [that it] is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.  This, they maintained, would lead to crises and to “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production”.

But the mass of free market praise singers grew as the world recovered from the barbarity and destruction of the second world war and a lengthy economic boom began.  The collective attitude of the praise singers was well summed up by economics Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson.  In 1970 he told a conference of his peers that the days of crises — of boom and bust — were over.  “The National Bureau of Economic Research has worked itself out of one of its first jobs, namely business cycles,” he claimed.

Three years later came the first crisis.  But it failed to dent the psuedo-religious belief in the market and the system as it existed.  Sinners were found:  the oil producers and their “artificial” lifting of the oil price.  What was needed was merely some adjustment;  there had apparently been too much tinkering with the market.

This attitude was summed by British Labour Party prime minister James Callaghan in 1976 when he said:

“We used to think you could just spend your way out of recession by cutting taxes and boosting government borrowing…that option no longer exists…it worked by injecting inflation into the economy.  Each time that has happened…unemployment has risen.”

Callaghan’s statement announced the turn away from what was known broadly as the Keynsian approach to that advocated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, an  approach now labelled neo-liberal.  Thirty years later, neo-liberalism has been found wanting and, without apparent irony, history is now repeating itself:  the present British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has increased government borrowing and embarked on a policy of spending as a solution to recession.

But this begs the main question:  is this merely another recession/depression, one of the cyclical slumps inherent in the system, or is it something different?  The answer is probably both yes and no:  yes, it is one of the slumps inherent in the system and no, it’s underlying cause is no different from those preceding it.  However, it is by far the greatest crisis the system has suffered, the cumulative result of decades spent ignoring a growing and fundamental fault.

The economic history of the modern, capitalist, world is peppered with examples of booms and slumps, of struggles for economic supremacy by individuals and exploiting minorities in regions, countries and blocs.  All the while, productive capacity and the ability to manufacture more with less grew as mechanisation and the bloody history of colonial plunder replaced plantation slavery and the dehumanising horror of the workhouse.

Peasants and self-sufficient communities, driven off their lands by force or taxes, swelled the ranks of the sellers of labour who, at one and the same time, became the purchasers of the very products they helped to make, distribute or provide the raw materials for.  Their wages and conditions improved only after desperate and often bloody struggles.

However, there were always some employers who realised the link between the worker as producer and as consumer.  None more so than Henry Ford.  He had little regard for workers, but understood that the survival of the system demanded the ability to sell, at a profit, the products that the sellers of labour create — and buy.  In his 1922 autobiography he noted:

“…Our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay.  If we can distribute high wages then that money…will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales”.

But he too did not foresee the looming absurdity of over capacity and over production that now afflicts almost every manufactured item, but is especially obvious in the textile, garment and motor vehicle industries.  Take vehicle maker Toyota, for example.  This year the company estimates that production will be more than 30 per cent below its current, 10 million units a year capacity.  It now contemplates reducing output by another 1 million vehicles.

Such reductions in capacity mean more and more unemployment and less and less purchasing power.  It also means tumbling prices as competition intensifies and this, in turn, leads, on a global basis, to a race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions.

South Africa — and especially the garment centres of Cape Town and Durban — have already borne the loss of tens of thousands of rag trade jobs.  Vehicle makers and component suppliers in the Eastern Cape have also been badly hit and are gearing up for even more job losses.

So far, government and its “social partners”, business and labour, have responded with a policy framework that amounts to financial bailouts and short-term retraining at half wages for retrenched workers.  This is based on the almost certainly forlorn hope that there will be an economic revival in the short to medium term.

The hope is forlorn because the mircrochip revolution is continuing apace.  These slivers of silicon lie at the heart of vehicle assembly lines, televisions, cell phones, the national power grid and the automated machines in factory and home.  They make work faster, easier and cheaper, using less and less labour.

This technological advance could herald a world of plenty for all.  It could liberate humanity from drudgery and poverty and repair the destruction already wrought on the physical environment.  But it could only do so on the basis of collective action for the benefit of the majority.

Our present anarchic system of minority ownership, based competition and the need to accumulate increasing levels of profit in order to compete even more successfully, works against such a development.  There is already evidence of where this may lead:  to fortified islands — whether suburbs, cities, or regions — of affluence in a global sea of desperate poverty and increasing savagery.

So we are faced with a stark choice, not just nationally, but internationally:  start to transform radically the economic system to one based on co-operation, under collective, democratic control — or persist with the existing system of competitive, minority control, whether by individuals, companies or states.  It may amount to a choice between planetary survival or annihilation.

There are a myriad contradictions in South Africa.  And none more so than the constant complaints about the paucity of science graduates in a region hailed as the cradle of humankind.  For this is also the region — and the country — where the unscientific creation myth still holds sway in most schools.

A curriculum that largely promotes blind faith within a society that also demands critical analysis and scientific rigor is doomed to create confusion.  Never mind the language issue if the message — in whichever of the country’s 11 official languages — is a blatant contradiction between faith in proclaimed absolute truths and the the need to question everything.

This is the contradiction too many of us live with today in a region most of the world — applying a scientific assessment based on the theory of the evolution of species — regards as the origin of homo sapiens.  The “Cradle of Humankind” at Sterkfontein, outside Johannesburg  and “digs” such as at the West Coast fossil park, north of Cape Town, provide a wealth of evidence about the origins of the planet and all that exists on it.

But it is evidence that is largely ignored or even contradicted within much of the schooling environment.  Shortly after his appointment as minister of education in 1994, Sibusiso Bengu was asked why he was not insisting that the theory of evolution be taught in all South African schools at all levels and he reportedly replied:  “I don’t want a revolution about evolution.”

In a country where the literal interpretation of Bibilical creation has been deeply implanted across all colours and classes, he was probably correct to be concerned about a backlash against any general introduction of evolutionary theory.  But it ensured that the line between dogma and rational thinking remained blurred.

The result was that teachers were left, especially at the primary school level, to carry on, if they wished, to preach that the stories contained in the book of Genesis in the Bible are the literal truth.  This despite the fact that most mainstream theologians accept the evidence presented by science about the age of the earth and the evolution of species.  However, when they do so, they add a theistic slant about the beginning of the beginning.

The Vatican, many Christian and Jewish groups, liberal Islamic and Hindu scholars all accept the evidence of the billions of years of history of our universe;  of the progress of evolution of species.  They merely maintain that these are the workings of divine laws;  laws stemming from an unknowable deity, from God.  This is a belief and, as such, requires no evidence;  but to science it remains an open question for which answers may or may not one day exist.

However, many lay members and some clergy of the various religions — in South Africa, more than 80 per cent of the population professes some form of Christian belief — do not accept the more nuanced approach of theistic evolution adopted by their leaders;  some hold fast to the literal, Biblical, text, others take on the idea of design, claiming that an intelligent force must lie behind the development of features such as the human eye.  But the design claims too, do not stand up to scientific scrutiny:  the human eye or the eyes of insects or fish or whatever all provide clear evidence of adaptation through millions of years of evolution and of the process of natural selection.

The explosion of knowledge about ourselves and all living things that accompanied the development of genetics has also underlined as never before, the evolutionary relationship of  living things.  There are, of course, arguments about precisely how or even exactly when various species parted company with a common ancestor.  But these. and other, similar, debates, are about the precise mechanics of the evolutionary process, they do not deny the process itself.

Such debates are also inevitable, because science, unlike dogma, does not lay claim to possessing the absolute truth.  All scientific truths are open to constant critical analysis:  they remain true within the bounds of our existing knowledge and are constantly refined and developed as our knowledge expands. That is how we, as a species, have progressed, sometimes against tremendous, often religion-based, resistance from those who benefit from maintaining ignorance.

Perhaps the best-known cases historically are those of Copernicus and Galileo who dared —correctly — to challenge the orthodoxy of the time that the earth was the centre of the universe.  Some 500 years have passed since then and it has been several hundred years since the first debates about evolution emerged, culminating in the production of Darwin’s Origin of Species, exactly 150 years ago this year (2009).

Since then, a wealth of geological, paleontological and, especially, genetic information has  underlined the veracity of the theory — not belief — of evolution.  Yet today, in the United States, surveys reveal that only 40 per cent of the population thinks that evolutionary theory is valid;  another 40 per cent opt for one or other form of creationism while 20 per cent admit that they do not know whether “human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals”.

Many among the creationist group are supporters of the “Creation Museum”, a multi-million dollar animated extravaganza in Petersburg, Kentucky that features human children playing alongside dinosaurs.  And, as late as 2005, the creationist lobby in the US attempted — using an “intelligent design” argument — to reintroduce creationism into the secular school system.

Surveys locally indicate that South Africa may have an even greater level of creationist belief;  that a considerable degree of ignorance exists about the evidence that continues to mount to validate evolution.  What seems certain is that a significant minority — if not a clear majority — of South Africans still cling to creation myths of one kind or other and that these continue to be promoted in many schools.  This is an indictment of the South African education system and a worrying sign for the future.

08.08.2008
To obtain answers that may be correct and useful, it is first necessary to ask the right questions. Yet every time there is a a strike, particularly at the national level, the same questions are asked of the same business people, economists and politicians and the same trite answers are trotted out.

The main query is: how much has this work stoppage cost? While there is usually passing reference to the loss of earnings by striking workers, the main thrust of the question is aimed at the economy, and/or particular business sectors.

But the only loss that can accurately be measured is the loss of wages. Because of adequate warning of impending strike action and steps that can be taken to minimise the economic impact, all other cost claims amount to vague, and usually exaggerated, guesswork.

However, the picture painted is of a destructive exercise in which there are no winners. Workers lose money, the economy and various sectors within it are damaged along with the image that government and business feel is essential to encourage investment.

This was the picture painted again this week with the nationwide stoppage organised by Cosatu unions. There was also some confusion about why the strike had been called, because Cosatu formally referred to it as a strike “against the electricity crisis”.
It was much more. But, as Cosatu’s Western Cape regional secretary, Tony Ehrenreich explains: “We were constrained by law because permission for a legal stoppage had only been given regarding electricity.”
However, the tens of thousands of workers in every major centre who gave up a day’s pay to protest, probably agreed with Cosatu’s Mpumalanga regional secretary, Norman Mokoena. He noted: “This is a strike against destructive neo-liberal policies. We are saying, enough is enough.”
In fact, as speakers at the various rallies made clear, the “gatvol factor” was in full swing against soaring electricity, fuel and food prices, along with the overall rise in the cost of living. The blame for this is laid squarely with government policies.

Unions across the board have pointed out that government could pay for needed infrastructure upgrades at Eskom by means of a grant and could radically lower the fuel price and bring in needed capital by levying a “windfall tax” on the massive profits generated by synfuel maker Sasol.
From the union perspective, the question that should therefore be asked is: What is the cost in human lives and suffering of continuing with these policies; policies that benefit a rich minority at the expense of the majority?

When rational argument and pleas make no headway, the only means trade unions within our society have to try to bring about change is to withhold labour, to strike. It is not an action taken lightly because the loss of a day’s pay is a real hardship, but one willingly undertaken because of the perception that a continuation of current policies will result in much greater hardships.

And the main sufferers are women. In a week that ends with national Womens’ Day, a classic and tragic example emerged with news of the death of Irene Grootboom. She was the woman who won a constitutional court challenge to the government to develop a programme to realise the right of access to adequate housing.

That was eight years ago. On Tuesday, Irene Grootboom died in the leaking shack in the informal settlement of Wallacedene outside Cape Town in which she still lived.

Says Ehrenreich: “Shortage of resources — asinamali, we have no money — is always the argument. But the money is there. There resources are available. It is the policies that are the problem.”

01.08.2008
A sad chapter in labour movement history ended this week with the formal dismissal of Willie Madisha as president of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu). And while there has been much concentration of the machinations, claims and counter claims surrounding his case these are merely symptoms of a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the governing ANC-led alliance.

Who is telling or has told the truth about alleged cash donations, disciplinary procedures, credit card misuse and professional misconduct may all be resolved before the Equality Court. But the underlying political reason for this eruption of hostilities remains clouded by confusion and tends still to be seen primarily as a fallout over who supported Jacob Zuma and who Thabo Mbeki as president of the ANC.

As a trade unionist, Madisha argued that neither should be supported, but that the union movement should concentrate on building its strength to demand alternative policies from whoever led the ANC. At the same time, as an ANC member, he felt free to support whichever candidate he thought best, while stressing that unity of the alliance was a priority.

He insisted there was no contradiction, but this was a classic example of the “two hats” argument that raged within the ANC-led alliance more than a decade ago. It was well summed up in 1997 by a member of the SA National Civics Organisation (Sanco).

Referring to Sanco members who were also ANC councillors, he asked: “How will a Sanco leader, who also holds the position of councillor, conduct himself if he is called on to lead a march of residents against the local authority? Who will he lead the march against — himself?”

This is a problem that has for decades confronted the members of the ANC alliance as opposing factions fought for control of what is now the ruling party. The stakes today are so much higher, but the questions remain the same.

For those committed to the alliance, there seem two choices: either support everyone being made to “wear the same hat”, by one faction seizing control over the ANC and, through this, hoping to control the levers of state power, or accept unity in diversity, with constant transparent debate among factions.

However, this latter course raises the prospect of a breach in alliance unity as contradictions come to the fore. And unity has always been stressed as a priority above all else.

Madisha fell foul of that by opposing the tactic that won the day for the “one hat” brigade at the ANC congress in Polokwane in December. Thanks to the organisational muscle of Cosatu, the support of the SA Communist Party (SACP) and a willingness to forge alliances with business and other interest groups, this faction has made government now theoretically answerable to an ANC executive which claims, through the ANC, to be the political representative of the population.

Yet the ANC has only 621 237 members, including almost all of the claimed 53 000 SACP members, out of a population of 48 million, against 1.6 million or more for Cosatu. At the same time, the economic policies of Cosatu are, in many ways, diametrically opposed to those of the ANC.

A senior Sadtu official explains: “Things have changed. Willie was great in the days of shopfloor democracy, but now we are in the era of democratic centralism. He can’t cope with that. He’s just too blunt; too outspoken.”

In other words, shopfloor democracy is history? If that is the case, perhaps a policy of backwards to a better, more democratic future might be in order.

25.07.2008
This week’s R17 million award against a KwaZulu-Natal textile company for not paying wage rates agreed by the bargaining council highlights yet again a fundamental, obvious and yet frequently unrecognised reality: the conflict between societal demands, government policies and business principle.
It has been said often enough, in this column and elsewhere, that the only principle for business is the maintenance and growth of the bottom line. That is a simple fact of life in our profit-driven global economic system.
It is one that trade unions, as the major societal bulwark against gross exploitation, have constantly to battle against. And the conditions under which this struggle is waged are largely determined by government policies.
But, in this brutally competitive, dog-eat-dog environment where labour confronts capital, hostility can also erupt between different sectors of capital. So it is that domestic garment manufacturers find themselves sharing the concern of the SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (Sactwu) regarding the continuing flood of cheap imports.
However, as surveys presented to the National Economic and Labour Council (Nedlac) have shown, there has also been a marked reluctance by local manufacturers to invest domestically. This dearth of capital investment has made it even more difficult for South African workers to compete in a liberal trade environment supported and, in part created, by the government. It is this environment that enables and encourages the flood of cheap imports.
And it remains a flood, despite the two-year “voluntary restraint” quota deal done with China on a range of items. In fact, there is strong evidence that Chinese goods, at a marginally higher cost than previously, and labeled “Made in Malaysia”, may still be a prime undercutting culprits. If this is not the case, it is difficult to account for last year’s 1 094 per cent surge in the value of Malaysian imports in this sector.
There is also evidence that importers, faced in September 2006 with the prospect of quotas on Chinese goods, placed forward orders. According to a report produced in March by Clothing Trade Council executive director Jack Kipling, it is estimated that as many as 51.7 million additional items of clothing were ordered in 2006 for delivery last year.
But the voluntary restraint agreement with China, which ends this year, has resulted in a quite sharp decline in imports sourced directly from China. However, a range of other countries has benefited greatly from this quota deal as importers switched their orders to countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Zimbabwe.
Most galling for the labour movement is the fact that the value of imports from Burma (Myanmar) a brutal military dictatorship, have soared by 450 per cent from R17.5 million in 2006 to R78.7 million last year. However, the biggest gainer in monetary terms is Indonesia which saw the value of its imports grow by 232 per cent to R160.1 million.
What this means is ongoing pressure on local manufacturers — and a continuing loss of jobs. Since 2003 when the flood of cheaper imported textiles, garments and footwear got fully underway, more than 20 000 jobs have been shed by major manufacturers in the clothing sector alone. Proportionately hardest hit has been the footwear sector where Sactwu estimates that two-thirds of some 30 000 jobs have now been lost.
With the system firmly in place, domestic policy unchanged and the end of the voluntary restraint agreement looming, more jobs are threatened. In such an environment, the R17 million award to 393 underpaid workers in KZN may be a pyrrhic victory. Unless the unions and wider society can persuade government to alter the rules.

18.07.2008
Forget all the arguments that have raged this week about weightings and rebasing, about dangerously high pay rises and the technical details of recalculating inflation. So far as the labour movement is concerned, there is only one simple fact to bear in mind: the cost of surviving, let alone living, especially for the working poor, has far outstripped any pay rises granted.
Trade unions have also for years now argued that official inflation figures have lagged far behind the real cost of living for most of the population; that wage rises, invariably measured against an official inflation rate, all too often amount to wage cuts.
This includes the latest 9 per cent to 14.25 per cent deal for garment workers, done via the bargaining council and announced on Monday. What the deal does is narrow the gap between the poorest and the sightly less poor in one of the lowest paid sectors of manufacturing.
According to this deal, slightly better paid workers in urban centres will receive the lower wage rises while the lower paid in more rural centres will take home slightly more in percentage terms. What this means for skilled and experienced machinists working in areas such as Botshabelo, Ladysmith or Caledon is a 12.71 per cent pay rise while general — unskilled — workers in the same areas receive 14.24 per cent.
These are figures that tend to cause near apoplexy among corporate economists and employers. But what they mean in fact is that skilled machinists now earn a basic wage of R399 a week or R1 726 a month while their unskilled co-workers can now look forward to weekly pay of R361 or R1 564 a month. By any standards, these are wage rates below poverty levels.
The women and men who receive these paltry wages also tend spend most of their income on basic foodstuffs. These were the items this column started monitoring in July last year in an urban supermarket. A comparison between the cost of 14 basic items 12 months down the line, is telling.
A year ago this week, the 14 items, ranging from bread and cooking oil to whole chicken, flour and mealie meal, cost exactly R118. This week, the same items cost R172.92, an increase of more than 46 per cent.
However, that staple, mealie meal, showed only a 5 per cent price rise, while samp cost 18 per cent more. Cooking oil, in contrast, almost doubled in price. Overall, what does seem clear is that the cost of living — of surviving — for the lower paid, even before taking into account soaring transport costs, is substantially greater than the official figures show.
In the row this week between Investec Asset Management and the official Stats SA there was agreement that the official inflation figure is “not accurate enough”. The main difference of opinion centred on when the new methods of calculation would be introduced because both parties seemed convinced that the revised calculations will reveal a lower inflation figure.
This rings warning bells for trade unionists and anti-poverty campaigners. They fear that the statistics are about to be massaged to the further disadvantage of the working poor. Of prime concern is the fact that the average amount of disposable income — the weighting — given to food may be lowered in the new year from 26 per cent to perhaps 18 per cent.
Without apparent irony, statisticians refer to the present — and coming — methods of calculation as “plutocratic” as opposed to “democratic”.
“And that really does sum it up,” was the reaction of several garment worker unionists.

11.07.2008
According to an old English rhyme, the famous Duke of York marched ten thousand men to the top of a hill — and marched them down again. This has come the represent an exercise in futility, the amassing of collective strength to attain a goal to no ultimate purpose.
What it has all too often amounted to within the labour movement internationally is the dissipation of justified collective anger by calls to futile protest. This is probably best described as the safety valve syndrome.
The current “rolling mass action”, called by Cosatu and which started in the Western Cape and KZN this week, has been labeled within sections of the labour movement in precisely such terms. Critics maintain that it is a tactical blunder, because no clear and detailed policy alternatives were first put forward.
But despite the arguments about tactics, there is unanimity about the need for alternative policies to be implemented as a matter or urgency. The detail is open to debate, but all seem agreed that a crisis exists that has resulted in mounting anger in working class communities across the country.
Anger is understandable since fuel, food and power price hikes have meant rapidly eroded buying power at a time when wage increases are failing to match the rise in the overall cost of living and already massive unemployment is growing.
Criticism of the current mass action is summed up by Federation of Unions (Fedusa) general secretary Dennis George: “It’s not good enough just to protest. Before we threaten to bring the country to a standstill, we should first put forward clear, alternative policies and insist government listens to us.”
George points out that, like Cosatu, Fedusa also lodged a “Section 77”, the notice under the Labour Relations Act of potential protest action that would be protected. But it gave no date for such action, calling first for an urgent meeting of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) to be convened to address what all the unions agree is a crisis.
Among the demands listed for such a meeting, which would bring together representatives from labour, government and business is “urgent short-term intervention…..to provide income and food support” such as “social relief and distress grants” to vulnerable households.
However, Cosatu’s Western Cape regional secretary Tony Ehrenreich maintains that sufficient demands have been made in Nedlac and other forums and that government has turned a deaf ear to them. He lists in particular the demand that the financing of Eskom infrastructure be from the government budget and not through increased tariffs to users.
The issue of the nationalisation of Sasol and of the coal mines had also been raised “although Cosatu could have made more of a noise about that”.
Eskom and Sasol also feature in the Fedusa notice, with that federation echoing Ehrenreich’s demand that import parity pricing be investigated and that there should be “increased investment by the government” in Eskom.
Other areas where the federations are in agreement are on the issues of price fixing and lack of competition, along with the level of corporate concentration in the food industry. Unions across the board are also united in their rejection of inflation targeting and the “crude mechanism” of raising interest rates.
In this they have the support of former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz who has noted: “One hopes that most countries will have the good sense not to implement inflation targeting; my sympathies go to the unfortunate citizens of those that do.”
So far as the unions are concerned — despite their tactical differences — we are among the most unfortunate of citizens and the time has come to do something about improving matters.

04.07.2008
“They seem to have won. They claim to have won, but still the beatings continue.” That was the bitter reaction yesterday of a Zimbabwean trade unionist in Harare.

He and several of his fellows also bewailed the fact that the contribution and suffering of the labour movement tends to be ignored. They argued, with justification, that the issues and the positions of the various parties in the conflict in Zimbabwe have become confused in the public mind.

Although not widely publicised, it is certainly true that the trade unions and their members have been among the greatest losers in the repression and violence across the Limpopo. They have also provided much of the impetus and policy direction for the opposition, quite apart from playing the key role in establishing the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The Professional Teachers’ Union (PTUZ) has been particularly targeted in recent months. Union research reveals nearly 5 000 teachers claim to have been assaulted with 600 hospitalised as a result of beatings. At least 230 homes belonging to teachers have also been burned down.
The general secretary of the PTUZ, Raymond Majongwe, who has twice in the past suffered beatings and electric shock torture, was yesterday reported missing. On Wednesday afternoon a group of men raided his Harare home. “We don’t think they found him, but we don’t know what has happened to him,” a union official says.

PTUZ treasurer Lad Zunde was also not home when a group of men arrived on Wednesday evening to say they had called to “take him to a funeral”.
However, the persecution of the unions is no recent phenomenon. The ZCTU and most of its affiliates have been prime targets of the state ever since Morgan Tsvangirai, as general secretary of the ZCTU, led the federation on an independent course from and, ultimately into, collision with the Zanu-PF government.

“Yet we were fighting the very things Mugabe now claims to be opposing,” says a ZCTU official. The unions, which were initially linked to the ruling party, opposed the liberal economic policies pursued by President Robert Mugabe and his government on the advice of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

In 1996, at the same time that the trade union federations in South Africa were drafting their alternative economic policy proposals, the ZCTU produced a 109-page “Beyond ESAP (Economic Structural Adjustment Programme)” document.
Like the South African labour movement’s Social Equity and Job Creation document, Beyond ESAP presents much more thoroughly considered policy positions than anything put forward by government. But the ZCTU also drew on the experience of South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which, at that stage, had not yet given way to the liberal vision of GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution).

Beyond ESAP argued for the establishment of a tripartite — labour, business and government — forum such as the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) to consider and confirm government policies. But it also demanded that “land redistribution should be given the highest priority” at a time when the Mugabe government was doing little about redistributing land.

The MDC has maintained this position, both on a “Nedlac-type” forum and on land redistribution. “There is no question of returning land to anybody,” Tsvangirai said in a interview last week with the local Amandla magazine. But he had no specific policy.
However, among the remnants of perhaps the most battered of all the Zimbabwe unions, the agriculture and plantation workers, there is now a demand for the establishment of farm worker co-operatives.

“But we first have to survive before we can talk about that,” says a co-op supporter.

27.06.2008
Zimbabwe’s embattled trade unionists were aghast this week when they heard that a Southern African Development Conference (SADC) meeting, dealing with Zimbabwe, was convened in the royal palace in Swaziland. Without a hint of irony it was announced that the SADC “troika organ” comprising Angola, Tanzania and Swaziland would be hosted by King Mswati III to discuss the state — or lack — of democracy in Zimbabwe.

This tri-national grouping is responsible for politics, security and defence within the regional body. As such it is another of the peculiarities of SADC, because political parties have been banned in Swaziland since 1973 and the country is ruled by an absolute monarch.

A voting system, authorised by Mswati, does exist. Known as Tinkhundla all voting for nominated individuals is done publicly and monitored by chiefs and headmen who have the power of patronage and are appointed by the king. Mswati also appoints the government, controls the judiciary, and exercises veto rights over all laws passed.

As Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven notes: “It is bitterly ironic that a conference to discuss democratic elections in Zimbabwe should be hosted by an autocratic monarch who stages elections that are no more free and fair than those staged by [President Robert] Mugabe.”

The Swazi unions and other pro-democracy forces in the mountain kingdom now hope that the issue of Zimbabwe will focus greater attention by governments and the public on the issue of democratic rights throughout the region.

That Swaziland remains a member in good standing of a regional grouping professing to promote and support freedom of association and parliamentary democracy is seen as hypocrisy within the labour movement. It is one of the reasons that Cosatu has, in the past, staged protest blockades of the Swazi border.

Plans for similar action along the border with Zimbabwe, which are likely to have wider local union backing, are now underway. This will also have the support of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) which represents 168 million trade unionists organised into 311 federations worldwide.

Earlier this month, at conferences of both the Commonwealth Trade Union Group and the ITUC it was resolved to intensify pressure on the Zanu-PF government in Zimbabwe. While there has been much media concentration on violence and harassment of members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), many of these individuals have been trade unionists.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), its affiliates and members have been specific targets of the regime. None more so than members of the Professional Teachers’ Union (PTUZ) who acted as polling station monitors during the March 29 elections, won by the MDC.

The ITUC this month lodged another official protest with Mugabe about the sacking of a regional PTUZ office and the severe assault of union members on June 8 and 9.

ITUC has also protested about the May 19 arrests of ZCTU president Lovemore Matombo and general secretary Wellington Chibebe. With the presidential run-off election still on the cards, they were released on Z$20 billion bail each, restricted to their homes and banned from addressing any political gatherings.

They appeared in court again on Monday this week. According to the prosecution they “communicated falsehoods” and “incited the public to rise against the government”.

“These are not charges per se, but they amount to accusations of treason,” says a ZCTU official who, for obvious reasons, wishes to remain anonymous. The case against them was again remanded, this time to July 30.

So July 30 is likely to be a focus for international trade union protest. But the beatings, abductions, torture and killings continue.

“All I can hope is that the situation in Swaziland does not have to degenerate to that stage before SADC acts to help us,” says Mario Masuku, president of Swaziland’s major — and still legally non-existent — pro-democracy Peoples’ United Democratic Movement.

20.06.2008
Using statistical sleight of hand and a smokescreen of misleading rhetoric, Eskom and the government have created the impression that they are not responsible for the energy crisis; that a combination of wasteful consumers and forces beyond their control created the mess we are in. And that mess, in turn, justifies the massive increase in tariffs that has now been agreed by the National Energy Regulator.

“Which is all nonsense. The responsibility for the entire mess rests with Eskom and the government,” says National Council of Unions (Nactu) president Joseph Maqhekeni. “We are not going to pay when the fault rests with the state.”

His views are echoed throughout the labour movement where consensus exists that bungling, short-sightedness and lack of planning on the part of the electricity utility and the government are at the root of the energy crisis.

This has brought to the forefront again the question of nationalisation, following the Eskom complaint that the high coal price is one of the reasons for added costs and and higher tariffs. The idea that Eskom should pay import parity prices for locally mined coal is seen as nonsensical.

It is put on the same basis as the fallacious argument about the country having “the cheapest electricity in the world”. As Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven points out, this frequently repeated official mantra is a myth. It was created by converting the cost of local electricity into US dollars and then comparing it with countries such as Denmark and the United States.

When like is compared with like — when costs, household incomes and prices are assessed in rand terms — South Africa certainly does not provide the cheapest electricity in the world.

“Besides, the electricity tariffs were set in a way that made the ordinary consumer pay more while the big companies paid less,” says Craven.

This is now leading to demands that Eskom declare how much the energy guzzling aluminium smelters at Hillside and Bayside in KwaZulu-Natal and the Mozal smelter in Mozambique pay for their electricity and how much these plants really contribute to the domestic economy.

The unions fear that the government and Eskom are again acting in an ad hoc manner; that they are preparing to take another disastrous step in the wrong economic direction. An urgent rethink is being called for.

Says Nactu general secretary Manene Samela: “There is still the opportunity to call a meeting of all stakeholders to address this issue and to shift this burden to the state.”

As the unions see it, the financial burden resulting from the crisis belongs with the state, which is both largely responsible for the problems and which has the wherewithal to fund the necessary infrastructure. “Because[the government] is cash flush, we are calling for a grant to Eskom, not a low-interest loan,” says Craven.

Maqhekeni agrees. “Trevor [Manuel] has a surplus. Why does he save it at the expense of poor people?” he asks.

Federation of Unions (Fedusa) general secretary Dennis George also questions why Eskom’s infrastructure cannot be financed by a government that could find R15 billion to finance the unproven technology of the pebblebed modular reactor.

These are matters the unions want urgently to discuss in order to find what some have referred to as “a sensible and holistic approach” to the power crisis. This would involve the drawing up of a comprehensive industrial strategy which many of the unions feel will involve elements of nationalisation.

Says George: “It s nonsense that the market will sort things out. A massive increase in electricity tariffs will affect just about everything else.”

And so the unions prepare to protest, not so much against the proposed increases in the cost of electricity, but for a set of policies that would make such increases unnecessary.