AIDC Statement: Ongoing strikes - Decent work does not case unemployment.

[Mark Weinberg @ AIDC]

AIDC Statement: Ongoing strikes - Decent work does not case unemployment. 

Issued by the Alternative Information Development Centre (www.aidc.org.za).

 

Media coverage of the ongoing metal workers strike has repeated the claim that “wages are too high in South Africa and high wages are the primary reason that more jobs cannot be created”.

 

These reports have consistently ignored the following facts:

 

FACT 1: WAGES ARE FALLING IN RELATION TO INCREASING PROFITS: The wage share of GDP has been falling since 1999. A larger and larger share of the new value produced by workers is being taken by corporations as profit. In current prices, workers have lost R480bn in wages to profit from 2000 to 2010 (Stats SA, GDP reports). More than half of all workers in SA earn less than R2500 per month, and a third of all workers earn less than R1000 per months, according to the National Planning Commission (NPC) Report.

 

FACT 2: INCREASED PROFITS DON’T CREATE JOBS! This growth in profits over wages for the past decade has not been creating new jobs. Rather than investing in more production, the corporations have invested in financial speculation and been taking their profits out from SA on a massive scale. “Unrecorded capital flows” out from South Africa the last ten years amounts to from 5 to 20% of GDP, every year.

 

FACT 3: THE ATTACK ON WAGES IS AN ATTACK ON THE UNEMPLOYED: Media reports have repeated claims that organised workers are preventing the unemployed form gaining work. They do not stop to ask how the unemployed survive from day to day. To a large extent the unemployed live off the income of workers: Government’s National Planning Commission (NPC) Report estimates that every wage earner supports approximately ten dependents.

 

Based on these facts it is easy to conclude that employers in South Africa can afford higher wages. Paying higher wages would stimulate economic growth and the creation of jobs. 

 

The profiteering of SA’s businesses (enabled by lax compliance with labour law and weak regulation of trade and capital flows) stand in the way of creating decent jobs that can offer the majority of South Africa’s the dignity prescribed in our Constitution.

In this context the Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC) supports the struggle of NUMSA and other unions for a living wage. A victory for them will set a better standard for the whole labour market.

 

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Issues by the Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC). AIDC is a social justice NGO that produces alternative knowledge and publishes the Amandla mgazine (www.amandla.org.za)

 

For more information or comments, contact Dick Forslund (AIDC Economist):

 

Cell: 079 912 3372

Tel: 021 447 5770

Email: di...@aidc.org.za