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Job seekers’ plight worsens in a globalizing
economy
By Farah Khan and Lucy Harraway
Johannesburg, South Africa, June 20 (IPS)— “It is hopelessness,
even more than pain that crushes the soul, but I have no other medicine
left now except to keep hoping,” says Simon Rapopo, an ex-miner in
Welkom in the Free State province, who has looked for work for ten years.
If June will be remembered for one thing in South Africa this year, it
is for the Growth and Development Summit held earlier this month.
That meeting has given Rapopo some hope because government, labor, and
business agreed to work to halve unemployment by 2014.
They will do this by a mix of public works projects, training, and securing
investment in the economy both by domestic and international business.
Rapopo is representative of South Africa’s huge challenge of joblessness.
Currently, there are 8.1 million South Africans unemployed, though government
uses a lower official estimate of 4.9 million people. Official unemployment
does not count people who have given up looking for work — so-called
“discouraged job-seekers.”
Most of them are people like Rapopo who were pushed into the rural areas
because their skills are no longer needed in a globalizing economy.
Since the mid-nineties, South Africa’s bedrock mining industry has
hemorrhaged 230,000 workers who cannot do anything except mine.
“I tried to get work but everyone rejected me. They told me I have
skills, but only to work on the mines,” said Rapopo.
Government hopes that an expanded public works program will be able to
soak up workers like him. An infrastructure budget of R10 billion (about
US $1.4 billion) over the next three years will put workers to toil on
building bridges, roads, and railroads as well as literally constructing
communities. School-building programs as well as the construction of clinics
and community centers will all be done using labor intensive production.
Rapopo is the old face of joblessness, while Thabo Dube is the youthful
visage. Over three quarters of those who do not work are under 24 years
old.
“I will not lie to you. We do crime. But then you cannot expect me
to wake up each day and ask my pensioner grandmother for money. Neither
can I go house-to-house asking for a rand or two,” said Dube from
his perch outside a shop in Soweto, Johannesburg.
The sight of young people doing nothing is common across South Africa,
and is a huge challenge, especially as the country is suffering a skills
crunch.
The Growth and Development Summit partners resolved that training is key
to getting young people into the economy. The meeting agreed that business,
government, and labor would get 72,000 apprentices into jobs by May 2004
and boost the number to 80,000 by 2005.
The apprenticeships are part of a complicated skills training strategy
that business has shied from because the Sectoral Education Training Authorities
(SETAS) which administer the scheme are not well run. Now business has
pledged to help them operate more efficiently.
The agreement has both carrots and sticks to ensure the goal of slashing
unemployment is met: labor pushed for and won an agreement from business
and government that efforts would be made to save jobs. Usually, when
faced with cash crunches or difficult times, the first instinct is to
cut labor.
They have agreed, tentatively, that retrenchments should become notifiable.
It is agreed that there is scope for government departments, parastatals,
and publicly listed companies to include information on total employment
in their annual reports, and for the Johannesburg Stock Exchange sustainability
index to contain a section on employment.
What are the plan’s chances of success? Economists are divided. The
radical economist Sampie Terreblanche does not believe government will
achieve its target because it has not dealt with income equality. South
Africa has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the world
and Terreblanche believes that summit will not redistribute wealth effectively.
What is required, he says, is a wealth tax on upper-income households
and more public spending on poverty.
Negotiators began working this week to ensure that the next Growth and
Development Summit does not go the way of previous meetings and become
a loud-sounding nothing.
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El Salvador health care unions end strike
June 17— On Fri., June 13, workers and doctors from
El Salvador’s health care sector celebrated the end of a nine-month
long strike that effectively halted all government plans to privatize
health. That morning, union leaders and government representatives finally
signed an agreement that put an end to the strike, and guaranteed that
most striking workers would return to their original positions.
On June 11, the not-so-neutral “mediators” — center-right
legislators mostly loyal to the government — attempted a last-minute
ploy, changing the wording in a key sentence in an effort to leave the
door open for future firings. But union leaders held firm, and in the
end a compromise was reached: most strikers would return to work under
the same conditions as before the strike. Forty-five doctors will be reassigned
to different hospitals within the public health care system, and 160 health
care workers who still face criminal charges for strike-related activity
will be evaluated individually.
A new commission made up of union and government representatives was formed
to begin studying necessary reforms in the health care sector. The commission
will take as its base a document written after the previous strike in
2000 which elaborates a “modernization without privatization”
that would bring health care services to currently underserved communities.
On Sat., June 14, jubilant workers and doctors poured out of the occupied
hospitals and converged in front of the Specialties hospital, a focal
point of resistance during the strike. The unions formally handed the
hospitals back to the government; following an inventory, they will begin
to return to work later this week.
Strikers leave the picket lines after 268 days knowing that the struggle
continues: although they did manage to stop President Francisco Flores’
privatization package, Flores will continue his efforts to sell off the
people’s health to US insurance companies and HMOs. Even more pressing
is the continued effort by the ARENA government to crush the powerful
health care unions; future firings could threaten the unions’ ability
to renegotiate their collective bargaining agreement.
Still, the health care sector has also committed itself to fighting against
the privatization of other public services that would have a lethal effect
on public health. The Salvadoran social movement, which has increased
in numbers and in strength through its actions in support of the healthcare
strike, has identified preventing the privatization of water as its next
goal.
Fifth round of CAFTA negotiations begins
Another threat to public services is the US-Central America Free Trade
Agreement (CAFTA), which entered into its fifth negotiating round on June
16 in Honduras. Negotiations have stalled over the issue of agricultural
products: the US demands full access for its agricultural products, even
while it uses bio-terrorism laws to block Central American products from
crossing the Rio Grande. In the decade since NAFTA was signed, such laws
have prevented Mexico from exporting even a single chicken to the US,
while the Mexican chicken industry has been decimated by a flood of cheap
US imports. The FMLN warns that CAFTA would take away import protections
and other tools to reactivate the agricultural sector that provides a
living to more than a million Salvadorans. Meanwhile, resistance to CAFTA
in the rural sector is growing, as more campesino organizations join into
strategic alliances with unions and other urban-sector organizations to
resist the free trade agreement.
Finally, Salvadoran President Francisco Flores, at a press conference
in Miami said, “Choosing between ARENA and the FMLN isn’t like
choosing between Democrats and Republicans, it’s choosing between
two completely different systems of life.”
Source: Community In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (www.cispes.org)
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