The Changing Discourse on Decent Work in South Africa:

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1 The Changing Discourse on Decent Work in South Africa: The Case of the Clothing Industry Edward Webster Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand November 2011, Brazil

2 The China Price In August 2010, South African government officials began closing down clothing factories in Newcastle, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal because the owners were paying less than the statutory minimum wage of R324 ($49) a week. This came in the face of angry protests from the workers whose jobs were threatened by the closure. The factory owners said they could not pay more and survive in the face of cheap Chinese clothing imports.

3 Restructuring of the clothing industry Global competition has led to a restructuring of the clothing industry. Growing informalisation of work through the growth of small and micro enterprises employing casual labour. This fragmentation of the labour market has weakened the power of the union and led to a representational gap (Katherine Joynt and Edward Webster, 9 May 2011, ICDD).

4 Clothing sweatshop in inner city Johannesburg

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6 Impact of Restructuring Three debates on restructuring have emerged in South Africa over the past year: 1. A debate on decent work 2. On the idea of a precariat 3. New sources of power

7 The Decent Work Debate 1. Social democratic- COSATU- sees decent work as a virtuous circle - Focus not only on wages but also includes a long-term, sustainable and human rights-based solution. It requires compliance with our laws, decent work, a focus on improving productivity, modernising work, up skilling workers, improving quality, diversifying product range and ensuring reliable delivery times (South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union, 2011). - Assumes it is relatively costless, without trade-offs or dilemmas.

8 2. Neoliberal which sees decent work as an obstacle to competitiveness (sections of business): - It is the government s commitment to Cosatu s insistence on decent work which compels employers to pay industry-wide minimum wages in each sector and apply a range of specified working conditions to all workers regardless of whether they are skilled or not that has driven South Africa into an economic cul de sac (Sparks, 2010). - The labour regime is heavily influenced by the increasingly outdated paradigm of permanent, 9am-5pm employment. Such employment simply does not have the flexibility needed to meet the manpower needs of the modern workplace (ADCORP, 2010). - ADCORP estimates that 32.8% of the employment in South Africa is in the informal economy; roughly 6.2 million workers.

9 3. The radical view is highly sceptical of the feasibility of decent work: - The left s demands for decent jobs, Franco Barchiese (2011) argues, have melancholically longed for a lost world where capitalism could be allegedly attuned with solidarity and social justice. - Gillian Hart (2011) has taken this radical critique in a more concrete direction arguing that the continuing dominance of the minerals-energy complex of mining and heavy industry in decision-making in the South African economy makes decent jobs for a substantial proportion of the working class within existing structures of capital accumulation and global competition a chimera, a fanciful conception.

10 Comparing Wages in China and South Africa The target of Hart s (2002) critique is not the advocates of decent work but those who argue that all South African industry has to do to become competitive is to follow the East Asian model of rapid low wage labour-intensive industrialisation. Hart discovered, if one used purchasing-power parity to get a measure of what workers can actually buy with their earnings, Newcastle (a town in South Africa) wages were 30%-40% below those in China. For Arrighi et al. (2008), China s developmental advantage stems from differences in public transport, educational, health and social security facilities, policies and investments.

11 Lessons from these Narratives To understand precariousness at work it is necessary to also examine the conditions for the social reproduction of the worker, the cost of transport, education, child care and basic needs such as water. This is what Mario Candeias calls the double precarisation of labour and social reproduction. To reduce the decent work deficit, South Africa will need to develop an alternative employment generating developmental path. Decent work should be seen as an objective to aspire to that can be progressively realised over a number of years.

12 The Debate on the Idea of a Precariat The precariat lacks employment security being in jobs usually regarded by employers as short-term or casual (Standing, 2009). Standings response to the precariat is a contradictory one. On the one had he sees them as a dangerous class with a potentially reactionary politics. On the other hand he sees them as potentially progressive; as a force leading them to the politics of paradise. He suggests that this dangerous class needs a voice and that the Basic Income Grant is a way of providing this class with a degree of security.

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18 New sources of power Traditionally unions have drawn their power from two sources : their bargaining leverage in the workplace and associational power. Chun suggests a new source of power, symbolic power, that involves public demonstrations and coalitions Could faith based organisations in coalition with unions provide a new source of power?

19 Sources of Workers Power Traditional forms of workers power Structural power Marketplace bargaining power Workplace bargaining power E.g. the ability to disrupt production through strikes Associational power Organisational power E.g. the ability to form unions and influence government policy through political processes New forms of workers power Logistical power E.g. the ability to disrupt the flow of goods at ports, or actions such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement or the occupation of the inner city of Johannesburg by the ANC Youth League Moral/symbolic power E.g. public demonstrations of immigrant workers or coalitions with community activists and intellectuals in the Democratic Left Front Source: Adapted from Webster, Lambert & Bezuidenhout (2008)