S.Africa faces wave of strikes as Covid-19 funds run out

South Africa faces a wave of industrial and strike action from both government and private sector employees as emergency Covid-19 funding runs out or has simply ‘gone missing’.

The week began with a pay strike that was meant to bring the Gautrain, a rapid-transport rail link between Johannesburg’s wealthy northern areas with the national administrative capital in Pretoria, to a halt.

Despite that effort in support of wage demands, the commuter line has managed a stripped-back service.

But Thursday sees the beginning of a four-day national strike by some of the biggest unions and union federations in the country over a failure by the administration of President Cyril Ramaphosa to follow through with a multi-year wage increase agreement.

Not enough money

The reason that a pre-negotiated pay rise will not kick in, says the Ramaphosa government, is that there simply is not enough money, given the enormous drop in revenues caused by the Covid crisis.

But the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu) – with 235,000 members, the largest public sector union in the country, representing state, health, education and welfare workers – is adamant that the negotiated pay rise must happen, Covid or not.

Nehawu insists on an eight per cent wage hike for front-line workers, plus better working conditions and personal protective equipment (PPE), among other demands.

The union says it will stay out on strike until its demands are met.

Other union bodies will join in the national strike action, including the SA Federation of Trade Unions, with over 500,000 members and Nehawu’s umbrella body, the Congress of SA trade Unions (Cosatu), with some 1.8 million members.

The strike will cause the SA economy to suffer another body blow as it attempts to recover from a second quarter crash in growth of a staggering 51 per cent.

Despite the extensive disruptions likely consequent to the strike – not least in both the health and education sectors – the SA government is still refusing to increase salaries of the country’s almost one-and-a-half million civil servants this year, in line with the three-year public sector wage agreement signed in 2018.

The issue was discussed between President Ramaphosa and Nehawu recently without resolution since the Ramaphosa administration is scrabbling just to pay the bills, let alone affording increases negotiated under utterly different economic conditions.

But the unions are having none of that argument.

Nehawu strikers at the offices of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), which assists many thousands of learners to pay for their higher education, said they would not budge until all outstanding payments were made.

All demands 'must be met' 

An indicator of the militancy running through union circles is evidenced by the vow not to stop striking until all demands made have been met. 

Last month, there was a national strike action over the same wage dispute, as well as the safety of workers during the pandemic and corruption, with Nehawu saying that if its demands were not met, workers – including in the health sector – would down tools.

The union said among key discussions with Ramaphosa was the current legal battle between the government and public-sector unions, which is before the Labour court relating to a three-year wage increase agreement that the government refused to honour this year.

The union said Ramaphosa had proposed a high-level meeting to resolve the dispute but Nehawu general secretary Zola Saphetha said the union’s leadership had instead called on Ramaphosa’s government to first withdraw its court case.

“We cannot negotiate or engage with the barrel of a gun to our head,” Saphetha said.

Upsetting the unions is also that their numbers are dwindling as the government allows ‘natural attrition’ to reduce very high levels of public sector employment and cut the government’s wage bill.

Some 120,000 public sector vacancies have resulted, drawing much union anger.

Efforts were being made – over strenuous union objections – in February this year, and under international investor pressure, to reduce the public sector wage bill by at least 10 per cent to make SA a more attractive investment destination.

But all that was before Covid-19.

While some elements of the dispute might be negotiable, even Public Service and Administration Minister Senzo Mchunu was forced to admit that the salary increases element remained “an issue”.

“Our doors remain open,” said Mchunu of possible further negotiations, which the unions ruled out, setting the scene for what seems likely to be a costly national strike.

The implications run far beyond the current showdown.

For one thing, Nehawu is the biggest and most powerful of the unions, which make up Cosatu, ostensibly the ruling African National Congress’s (ANC) ally in the ‘tripartite’ ruling alliance, along with the SA Communist Party.

Nehawu spokesmen have said its leadership and members were sufficiently annoyed by the government’s about-turn on the promised pay increase that it “might withdraw” its political support for the ANC in the forthcoming elections.

That would be a disaster for the ANC – though many members of the striking unions are likely, when push comes to shove, to still vote for the ‘party of liberation’ in scheduled local government elections just six months away.

Cosatu, which has several times in recent years verged on breaking away from the ANC and forming its own dedicated ‘workers’ party’, is strongly supporting the Nehawu position, setting an ominous scene for Ramaphosa’s government, which cannot meet the demanded increase, pre-existing agreement or not.

There is another level to this developing issue, with many worrying potentials. This is  the emerging dynamic of employed (and union-protected) workers versus the vast pool of unemployed – now at least 40 per cent of all working-age persons – who make up this country’s most vulnerable and number somewhere between 15 and 20 million out of a population of 60 million.

It is a case of the working poor against the extremely poor – a scenario which leading political, economic and sociological analysts almost all say is likely to lead to increasing social tensions, political extremism and severe economic fallout which SA can now ill afford.