Silly season

By Lawrence Mashimbye

The so-called “strike season” in South Africa is no longer funny. Day in and day out we hear one union after the other calling workers to riot.
I know the complaints around conditions of employment and salary increases are pertinent and imperative, particularly in a country that survived apartheid and its bad labour practices. But the recent striking patterns present an ugly picture that cannot be tolerated.

Please don’t get me wrong; I’m not calling for South Africans to be denied their basic right to bargain, but I’d like to suggest that the salary and conditions of employment negotiations can be better handled and that this can minimise the impact that strikes have on the economy, on employment and on people who depend on the services provided by workers.

A few weeks ago, municipal workers in Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal took to the streets to demand an 18% salary increase and better working conditions. Before that, workers in the petroleum sector downed their tools for more than two weeks demanding a 13% salary increase. Last year, we witnessed a strike by the defence and health departments — are these not essential services?

Again, these strikes are often characterised by prolonged stayaways leading to many working days being lost, particularly if central bargaining by a federation is involved.

What does this mean for South Africans?

The debilitating picture of this “strike season” could be viewed in two ways.

Firstly, the people receiving services are not served with dignity. For example, the municipal strike is often accompanied by stinky, dirty streets while the health workers’ strike leaves patients dying of manageable and curable conditions. Surely citizens of this country who pay, directly or indirectly, for these services deserve better from these service providers?

Secondly, the strikes are often accompanied by violence and vandalism of employers’ property. Surely employers deserve protection from their employees?

The tendency to bargain for salaries way higher than the inflation rate raises the following two concerns of national priority: one, the sustainability of these high salaries without cutting the number of jobs in the industries concerned, and two, the ability of the economy to create more jobs in a country with escalating labour costs.

A country like South Africa cannot afford to run out of petrol because of the striking petrol distributors. Nor can this country afford to see a further increase in maternal and infant mortality because of healthworkers’ strikes.

An urgent intervention is needed to address the ills of the so-called “strike season”. Labour unions and employer-affiliation bodies must play a greater role in keeping their domestic quarrels quieter by committing to the binding resolution in a conciliation, mediation and arbitration process.

In actual fact, unions and employer-affiliation bodies should continually engage, and not wait for a dispute to bring them together. The lack of a pro-active approach leaves us in this embarrassing situation.

In labour relations in this country, all means should be devised to resolve disputes before a strike is considered an option.

Lawrence Mashimbye is an epidemiologist/biostatistician who is fascinated by studies of infectious diseases and by political and business discourse. He writes this article in an independent capacity.