Cosatu embarks on a nationwide protest

Public sector workers downed tools and stayed at home to protest against the government’s failure to implement wage increases on Wednesday. Union leaders in three of the largest federations, Cosatu, Fedusa and the National Council of Trade Unions have been on a collision course with the government after it backed out of a pay hike deal following finance minister Tito Mboweni’s huge budget cuts to contain rising government debt and a ballooning budget deficit. We need to dispel the general idea, propagated by the public sector unions, that the public sector are poorly paid. Stats SA data going back ten years shows that the public sector wages lie above the private sector, and if you look at the slope of the curves, it shows that the public sector enjoys greater increases, and also, the rate of change is less than that in the private sector – in other words, the public sector increases in pay are greater than the private sector, as well as the fact that the public sector are more resistant to market conditions. If you factor in productivity, which is diabolical, one recalls Churchill’s words, when he said “never in the field of human work has so much been earned by so many for doing bugger all”. Michael Avery asks Mathew Parks, Parliamentary leader for Cosatu, to explain how crippling the economy stimulates growth and creates jobs.