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| Eddie Cottle |
Over the past 20 years South Africa’s construction sector has undergone marked expansion. In the apartheid era it was constrained by sanctions and racial policies. However, the post-apartheid state actively encouraged a series of policy measures to foster the economic growth of South African construction firms. Key to the policy process was the establishment of a Construction Industry Development Board, a Register of Contractors, the scheduling of public sector spending through the Medium Term Expenditure Framework process, and support programmes to develop the emerging black contractors. The post-apartheid state also became the construction sector’s biggest single client in the delivery of social and economic infrastructure.
The almost immediate shift from the social democratic Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1994 to a series of neo-liberal macro-economic policies, from 1996 onwards, ensured increasing levels of labour flexibility and improved productivity of the labour force. State intervention was therefore crucial in ensuring that the construction sector enjoyed 18 years of sustained economic growth with an average GDP contribution of 2.3 per cent over a 20 year period.
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| Thorsten Schulten |
It is just a few weeks since the minimum wage was introduced in Germany, but it is already becoming very clear that its implementation in practice really cannot be taken for granted. Scarcely a day goes by without the media reporting new minimum wage breaches. Online, meanwhile, law firms openly offer counselling on how to sidestep the minimum wage. And every day on the minimum wage hotline set up by the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS), hundreds of employees tell of the sometimes highly devious attempts being made to do them out of the minimum wage.
Back in the autumn of last year, in a study commissioned by the Labour Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Hans Böckler Foundation’s Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI) was already asking questions about the preconditions for the successful implementation of minimum wages. It examined examples from other European countries (France, the UK and the Netherlands), as well as German experiences with regional and sectoral minimum wages, which have existed for quite some time.[1] Basically, it identified five factors for success:
- A precise and manageable definition of the minimum wage
- Clear, checkable provisions on the relationship between the minimum wage and working times
- The existence of efficient monitoring institutions and processes
- Effective instruments for wage-earners to get their minimum wage entitlements applied
- The broadest possible social acceptance, including by large sections of business.
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| Karl Cloete |
The expulsion of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in November 2014 was a watershed moment. It deepened further the crisis in the Alliance between the ANC, COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP). In addition to fighting for a radical shift amongst trade unions, NUMSA also played a major role in the establishment of a new United Front which will be launched in 2015.
In December 2014 Sam Ashman (SA) and Nicolas Pons-Vignon (NPV) interviewed Karl Cloete (KC) about a tumultuous year and the road ahead.
SA / NPV: Those who are not in South Africa may think that NUMSA is responsible for undermining COSATU and working class unity. How would you respond to this?
KC: When COSATU was established in 1985, NUMSA was in the centre of the unity talks. COSATU was a product of collective struggle and the federation shook the South African landscape under apartheid and played an important part in the 1994 democratic breakthrough. But COSATU, particularly over the last eight years, has almost totally shed its independence. It has become embroiled in factional politics within the ANC and the SACP. The COSATU that used to be a campaigning formation has become an organisation unable to take forward critical struggles – around precarious work, unemployment, the privatisation and commodification of services. We are challenging legally our expulsion and we have appealed for the convening of a COSATU Special National Congress (SNC). COSATU’s history is not something you walk away from easily.
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| Muzaffer Ekin Şişli |
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| Bilge Çoban |
Resulting from various violations of the fundamental workers’ rights such as oganising, collective bargaining and collective action (including strikes), union rights have always been at the top of the freedom agenda in the Turkish unions. The Turkish government has directly violated legal framework of the country, as well as International Labour Organisation conventions 87 and 98 as in the many cases. Starting on the 29th of January 2015 and ending a day later, the Metal workers' strike, is the third strike ban in the last 12 months and considered to be the largest one in last 20 years of Turkey (Çelik, 2015). Its suspension is to last for 60 days The Cabinet of Ministers delayed the metalworkers' strike which had covered 15 thousand members working in 42 different companies, claiming that it is prejudicial to the national security. These companies are represented by the MESS (Association of Metal Product Industrialists) group collective agreement.
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| Sangheon Lee |
Income distribution is now back to the centre of economic growth, with a broad consensus that inequality has been increasing to a worrying level which require serious policy interventions. Most recently, Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, has offered a powerful historical reminder that income inequality has been a thorny issue with which the modern society is been struggling and that, excessive inequality, if left unaddressed, has severe social and economic consequences. Thus, the “conventional wisdom” that inequality was an inevitable by product of the structural transformation from rural/ agricultural to industrial/urban employment and that after this initial rise of inequality growth would be eventually taking care of inequality without “artificial” non-market intervention has lost its empirical ground and is now in retreat. The Kuznets curve which was once understood to embody such belief is being discredited.
Trends in inequality are not automatically determined by economic growth. Rather, it is the matter of social and political choice. Paradoxically, once we move away from the “comfort zone” of the Kuznets curve, we can listen to his original message. In fact, Kuznets’ turning point beyond which inequality begins to decline is not economic. He said that the period of falling inequality was driven by “legislative interference and ‘political’ decisions” that reflected a “re-evaluation of the need for income inequalities as a source of savings for economic growth” (Kuznets 1955). And he added that these processes themselves were driven by “the growing political power of the urban lower-income groups”. With these observations, it should not come as a surprise that he called for “a shift from market economics to political and social economy” (Lee and Gerecke 2015).
