One of Nedlac’s great achievements in the recent past was the agreement on a new and higher minimum wage. But the agreement came with a caveat insisted on by business: that to have a legally protected strike, workers would have to first have a secret ballot.Reconstructing motivations and history a little freely, it seems the logic behind the move worked something like this: for business, it was clear that they were going to lose the issue of a higher minimum wage in Nedlac.
The sheer all-round destructiveness that strikes involve is now getting some belated recognition from the government, which acceded to business’ demand. Arguably, because Cosatu is now predominantly a state-sector union, it was less motivated to reject the idea of secret balloting because it is anyway protected by its ally, the ANC, being in control of the state. Cosatu’s strength now lies primarily in its link to the ANC rather than on the shop floor, cynics would say, making it more difficult for the union to differ with government on key policy issues.
Furthermore, the legislation has been poorly drafted, he said, because although it requires a plurality of votes to approve a strike, it does not specify what proportion of the workforce needs to vote. There is some academic disagreement about whether SA is actually a strike-prone country, but it’s probably fair to say it is. The easy calculation just counts the number of strikes, and those have been increasing every year, so that 2017 – the latest date official data has been released – had 121 strikes, the largest number for a decade.
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