Address on behalf of Cosatu,Fedusa and Nactu, by Zwelinzima Vavi

9 September 2000

Deputy President Jacob Zuma, leaders of COSATU, NACTU and Fedusa, leaders of government, community and business, distinguished guests and delegates, comrades and friends.

We meet here to reflect on the progress made in the past year, since we last met at the NEDLAC Summit. We have experienced a year full of frustrations, certainly, but also bringing hope that we are beginning to face up to the challenges our country confronts - above all, the challenges of rising joblessness and deepening poverty.

Only a few days ago, Statistics South Africa released a study that suggests that income inequalities have actually widened since 1994. They attribute the trend to the loss of formal jobs. Since 1990, South Africa has lost up to a fifth of all formal positions. Almost one in ten formal jobs disappeared in the past four years.

I want to remind you of the Jabu Xulu and Cynthia Gumede story. Following her retrenchment, Cynthia has not found any formal work. She has lost her pension and her medical aid, and is trying to keep body and soul together by working on piecework at home - she is the only breadwinner in the family. She has rejoined her union as an informal-sector worker.

As a result of the difficulties now experienced at their home, Cynthia's children are not doing so well at school, which means it will probably be harder for them to find a productive role in the economy in the future. At the end of the year, Cynthia's colleagues in the teachers' unions will be blamed for the poor results.

Cynthia's experience underlines the hollowness of the idea that growth in the informal sector will make up for the loss of quality formal jobs. Nedlac research shows that a quarter of KwaZulu Natal, Mpumalanga and Gauteng are trapped in the informal sector earning less than R600 a month. Cynthia Gumede's story and the Statistics South Africa study on incomes show the linkage between growing poverty, rising income inequalities and the destruction of formal jobs and their replacement by survivalist enterprise.

Given the challenge of rising unemployment and deepening poverty, our key achievement this year cannot be captured by looking at the specific outputs that the Executive Director will list in his report. Our main achievement is the re-commitment of all the NEDLAC constituencies to undertake serious discussions on the deep-seated problems of unemployment and poverty. To that end, we have agreed to focus on how to engage with globalisation, investment, economic empowerment and other measures that address underdevelopment.

This re-commitment has emerged in the fact that all the constituencies have sent senior delegates to our recent discussions. It appears, too, in the decision to identify strategic priorities and enter into structured engagements around them.

As I mentioned earlier, achieving this degree of commitment also entailed some frustrations. We have not arrived at this point without considerable struggle and effort.

You will be pleased to know that I met Jabu and Cynthia again during our national strike. Yes, they were there, at the demonstration in Josie, marching with tens of thousands of others behind the banners of their union.

Jabu and Cynthia shared our pride and excitement at the way in which the people of South Africa united to support the demand that we - those of us who lead the NEDLAC constituencies - begin to act urgently to address the scourge of unemployment. We were joined, you remember, by four million workers - half of them not even COSATU members. In these demonstrations, the people of South Africa showed that they can still mobilise in support of their claims. That in itself shows the robustness of our society and our democracy. After all, mass organisation forms the basis of the people-centred development to which we aspire.

As Jabu said at the time, the mass support also underlines the urgent need to address unemployment. After all, virtually every survey shows that our people see joblessness as the single most important challenge facing our country. So maybe we should spend more on creating employment, even if it leaves less for defence.

Even after the national strike, we did not find it easy going. COSATU's leadership decided we had to protest ourselves, to ensure that these issues are attended to by the senior leadership of all constituencies. As a result, we spent a not-very-comfortable night at NEDLAC (despite the kind hospitality of the staff).

But we are pleased that we have now entered into serious discussions around all of our demands.

Labour tabled a comprehensive document on a strategy for job creation at the last Nedlac Executive Committee. We here only consider the progress made in taking our ideas forward.

Great progress has been made around the implementation of the National Framework Agreement on State Owned Assets - the NFA. This agreement forms the basis for the development of a more consultative approach to restructuring, one that takes into account the interests of all stakeholders, including workers. It has already ensured a more balanced and in-depth consideration of restructuring plans by major parastatals, which could lead to the saving of thousands of jobs and, in the longer run, the creation of thousands more.

On tariffs and our proposals to make it harder to retrench, progress has been less marked. Still, we feel that there is now a real willingness to engage on the issues. At the Clothing and Textiles Summit, the government expressed a new approach that would permit much more detailed consultation with labour around tariff issues. We will start negotiating the amendments to the labour laws at NEDLAC in the near future, and hope to take forward appropriate changes to Section 189 through that process.

In some ways the most far-reaching and exciting area of engagement has emerged around the sector summits. Sector summits have a critical role to develop a industrial policy and growth. Above all, they must help protect existing jobs and create new, quality employment on a large scale. They give us all the chance to help develop measures appropriate to the needs of specific industries, to reshape the economy to meet the needs of the majority, and to mobilise our constituencies to build the economy.

We have now held summits on mining and on clothing and textiles. These engagements have provided an important way to structure tripartite discussions around industrial policy. Even more important, both these summits have established new tripartite structures to monitor the new policies and develop new ones as necessary. If we can make these structures function properly, we will have introduced a critical new form of economic governance, one that can ensure continual improvements in sectoral policies.

We have agreed to hold further summits in all the key sectors - there are already plans to have them in the near future for the public service and for telecommunications.

These developments over the past year have gone together with the strengthening of NEDLAC as the core institution for tripartite work and negotiations. It will retain that role as long as we all demonstrate our commitment by participating actively, at the most senior level, in its discussions, and by looking innovatively and creatively at the challenges that we face collectively.

In this context, all the chambers of NEDLAC have made some progress in the past few months. The developments in the Financial and Monetary Chamber are perhaps particularly noteworthy. The apparent reluctance of the Minister of Finance to engage the social partners was marked in recent years. This was reversed by the recent meeting of the Chamber, which has begun to engage more systematically on fiscal policy. While the Department still seems to want unnecessary restrictions on discussions of budgets, at least we have laid the foundations for more serious engagement.

We are pleased that the scope for consultation has widened in recent months with the establishment of the Presidential working groups and the Millennium Labour Council. These institutions can play a positive role by bringing together leaders of important constituencies in an informal way.

They will not, of course, replace NEDLAC, which is critical because it clearly defines the scope of engagements on social and economic policy, and because of its representivity. For this reason, we are happy that the other forums have shaped their work so as to reinforce the position of NEDLAC, rather than seeking to compete with it. The critical issue is that NEDLAC will remain the site of formal decision-making, while the others provide forums for less structured discourse.

Before closing, we want to express our gratitude to the Executive Director of NEDLAC, Philip Dexter, who has played an outstanding role in leading the organisation in the past year. He has played an important role in structuring focused discussions around the priorities that we have identified, and in ensuring that the organisation meets the needs of the constituencies.

Comrades and friends,

We have faced considerable tension and stress in the past year. Perhaps that was necessary to ensure that we all focus on the real issues in our society. We have agreed on the need for a New Deal to reconstruct our society in order to address the alarming levels of unemployment and poverty, and to ensure shared growth in the future.

Now we have to get down to the task of defining the substance of that New Deal, and the roles and responsibilities of each constituency. We do not expect easy agreements. Rather, we have to bring all of our collective knowledge and experience to bear to analyse our situation and, on that basis, define African solutions for African problems. We need to find solutions that do not undermine the interests of any constituency unfairly, but rather ensure the shared development and growth needed to ensure employment creation and address poverty on a mass scale.

Thank you for listening