Bargaining for a living wage

Since the mid-1990s, the South African labour market has been reshaped to conform to the demands of a modern developing economy, while at the same time responding to the needs of what government characterises as a “developmental state”. This report focuses on South African labour market and the key issues that impact and affect collective bargaining.

The report examines a wide range of issues relating to the labour market including economic growth, employment and unemployment, working conditions, industrial action and wages. It also looks at occupational health and safety, HIV/AIDS and the work of labour market institutions. Some of the key findings are as follows:

• positive economic growth in the last few years has done little to reduce the rate of unemployment in South Africa
• unemployment is structural, spatial and gendered
• youth are the worst affected by unemployment. Almost 70 per cent of the youth have no jobs with the age cohort 15-24 years being the hardest hit
• the majority of workers have neither a provident fund nor medical aid cover
• sectors such as mining, farming and construction experience very high rates of deaths and injuries
• strikes are increasingly becoming long drawn and violent. There is also evidence of increasing use of scab labour by employers
• unions are increasingly including HIV/AIDS issues in their collective agreements but implementation of HIV/AIDS programmes is far from effective
• labour market institutions face many challenges including the lack of a coherent jurisprudence while some decisions handed down especially by the Supreme Court of Appeal in labour disputes have undermined the rights of workers
• non-standard forms of unemployment have been on the increase yet unions still have not developed creative strategies to organize atypical workers

The report concludes that the increasing number of unemployed people, the rise in atypical forms of employment and the decline in bargaining councils all mean that the ability and strength of workers to bargain for a living wage has come under severe pressure. Rolling back these setbacks is a challenge that requires unions to mobilise more creatively and more actively, particularly where they have been spectacularly absent.