Today's Labour News

Bloomberg writes that in 1987, Cyril Ramaphosa led SA’s biggest-ever mining strike, with some 300,000 miners — from a union Ramaphosa himself had founded — walking off the job to protest pay and working conditions.  

The strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) demonstrated the power that organised black labour could exercise and the economic damage it could inflict on the country.  Three decades later, Ramaphosa, now the reformist president of SA, is seeing the issue from the other side.  One of the chief obstacles to his agenda is SA’s powerful unions, which are deeply embedded in the government and economy.  To reignite growth in a stagnating economy and lower one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, he may need to take on the movement he helped create.  Some analysts call it his “Thatcher moment,” a reference to the then-British prime minister’s defeat of that country’s powerful labor unions, which set the UK economy on a decades-long growth path.  “He wants to move the power to the middle, he wants to reduce the power of unions in a party that is in an alliance with the unions,” observed academic Prof Nic Cheeseman.  To complicate matters, Ramaphosa faces a divided and competitive labor movement.  In 2014, Numsa took its 340,000 members out of labour federation Cosatu.  Meanwhile, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union has rapidly risen to challenge the NUM.  But something will have to be done.  Eskom is struggling to keep the lights on, the country’s sole remaining investment-grade credit rating is at risk, unemployment hovers at 27% and growth in 2018 was a paltry 0.8%.

• Read this well informed article by Antony Sguazzin in full at Moneyweb

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