May Day greetings to the Workers!

On Tuesday, 1 MAY, our workers will join the workers of the world to celebrate May Day. We take this opportunity to salute the South African workers and their counterparts throughout the world and to wish all of them a Happy May Day!

We are certain that other sections of our population, recognising the leading role that our workers played in our liberation struggle, and the contribution they are making now to the process of the reconstruction and development of our country, will also join our workers as they celebrate May Day.

One of the central objectives of our struggle for national liberation, the national democratic revolution (NDR), was and is the liberation of our workers from racial oppression and the attendant super-exploitation, as well as the triple oppression of the women workers.

It is therefore important that as we continue to pursue the goals of the NDR we should constantly assess the progress we are making towards the achievement of these objectives, bearing in mind the various objectives set, in particular, by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

In this regard, among other things, the "Global Report under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work"
submitted to the 2004 International Labour Conference, said: "The fundamental principle of freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining is a reflection of human dignity. It guarantees the ability of workers and employers to join and act together to defend not only their economic interests but also civil liberties such as the right to life, security, integrity and personal and collective freedom. It guarantees protection against discrimination, interference and harassment. As an integral part of democracy, it is also key to realising the other fundamental rights set out in the ILO Declaration."

Coming as we do from our long history of colonialism and apartheid, it was necessary that the NDR should set itself various goals intended specifically to benefit and contribute to the upliftment of the working class in our country. Among other things, therefore, the democratic revolution pursued and pursues the objectives to:

• ensure that the workers enjoy full democratic rights together with the rest of our people;
• entrench the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining;
• create the possibility for the organised working class to participate in the formulation of public policies that relate directly to its future;
• ensure the sustained improvement of the standard of living and quality of life of the workers;
• reduce and eradicate unemployment in the context of a growing economy;
• end disparities in wages and working conditions based on race, colour and gender;
• expand workers' access to such benefits as health and safety at work, unemployment insurance, general health care, a retirement income and maternity and paternity leave;
• raise the skills levels especially of the workers drawn from the previously oppressed sections of our population; and,
• open the doors of culture and learning both to the workers and their children.

The historic political victory of the democratic revolution in 1994, in which the working class played a leading role, was the defining moment which created the possibility for the achievement of these objectives. For the first time in 350 years all the workers of our country won full democratic rights, including the right to vote and stand for election to all our legislatures, ending the long period during which the majority of the working class had been denied the possibility to participate in determining the destiny of the country of their birth.

To give further expression to this new possibility, the democratic revolution acted immediately to approve the National Economic Development and Labour Council Act, No 35 of 1994, which established the Council (NEDLAC). The Founding Declaration of NEDLAC, signed by representatives of the government and organised labour and business on 18 February 1995, entitled "Growth, equity and participation", said:

"The democratic election of 1994 opened a new era for South Africa. It was the decisive step in the transition to democracy. Now our country must meet the challenges of social development and economic growth.

"South Africa is a land rich in resources, with a strong and diversified economy. It has a people eager to make the democracy work. It has a well-developed physical and financial infrastructure, such as transport, telecommunications and the banking system.

"South Africa is also characterised by severe inequality in incomes, skills, economic power, ownership, and a skewed pattern of social development. This, together with large-scale unemployment and inadequate economic performance, has created major problems in our society.

"Government, organised labour, organised business and community-based organisations need to develop and strengthen cooperative mechanisms to address the challenges facing our new democracy. Our three defining challenges are:

• Sustainable economic growth - to facilitate wealth creation; as a means of financing social programmes; as a spur to attracting investment; and as the key way of absorbing many more people into well-paying jobs.
• Greater social equity - both at the workplace and in the communities - to ensure that the large-scale inequalities are adequately addressed, and that society provides, at least, for all the basic needs of its people.
• Increased participation - by all major stakeholders, in economic decision-making, at national, company and shop-floor level - to foster cooperation in the production of wealth, and its equitable distribution...

"The National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) is the vehicle by which government, labour, business and community organisations will seek to cooperate, through problem-solving and negotiation, on economic, labour and development issues, and related challenges facing the country."

Since its foundation more than ten years ago, NEDLAC has considered such important pieces of legislation as:

• the Labour Relations Act;
• the Basic Conditions of Employment Act;
• the Employment Equity Act;
• the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act;
• the Occupational Health and Safety Act;
• the Skills Development Act;
• the Skills Development Levies Act; and,
• the Unemployment Insurance Act No 63 of 2001.

These laws, in addition to the relevant Constitutional provisions, represent a revolution in terms of the legally protected rights of the South African working class and the legal framework that enables us to address the objectives mentioned in the Founding Declaration of NEDLAC, which encompass the goals of the NDR.

For example the democratic state, acting through the Minister of Labour, has made a number of Sectoral Determinations affecting some sectors of the economy, to set minimum wages and prescribe working conditions to protect the most vulnerable sections of the working class from abuse and super-exploitation. These Determinations have included farm workers, domestic workers, forestry workers, contract cleaners, workers in the private security sector, workers in the wholesale and retain sector, children in the performing arts, and so on.

For a long period of time, at least from the 1970s, the South African economy, among other things, imposed increasing misery on the working people of our country. Among other things, this was expressed through retrenchments and greater reliance on machinery rather than increased employment to expand production.

This meant that for at least two decades not only was the army of the unemployed increasing, but the number of employed workers was also diminishing. This process also represented a fundamental structural change that would pose an important challenge to the NDR.

The colonial and apartheid economy had been built on the backs of millions of cheap and unskilled black workers who could easily be dumped into, or left to rot in the native reserves/Bantustans as "surplus people". However, as the economy came to rely more on machinery and was later, during the democratic years, fully exposed to the global market, it required skilled and semi-skilled workers, having prescribed that the millions especially of African workers would remain uneducated and unskilled.

This has placed the challenge of improving the level of education and the skills of our workers at the very heart of the task of the NDR to improve the standard of living and quality of life of our working people. This is precisely the reason that the democratic revolution had to approve the Skills Development Act and take other initiatives to prepare our workers and working people fully to participate as producers in the modern economy and society we are striving to build.

With regard to the important challenge posed by the sustained shrinkage of the working class reflected in continuous retrenchments and natural attrition, and therefore the growing numbers of unemployed workers, it is only during the period of the democratic revolution that we have begun to reverse this trend.

The number of employed people has been increasing at a rate of about half-a-million a year in the past three years, amounting to one-and-a-half million during this period. Thus the number of employed people increased from 12.3 million in September 2005 to 12.8 million in September 2006. The number of unemployed persons dropped from 4.4 million in September 2005 to
4.3 million in September last year. Also on the decline was the number of persons who were not economically active, which dropped from 12.9 million to 12.8 million.

Of significant interest also is the report in the latest Quarterly Employment Statistics survey that there are around 750,000 more jobs in the formal economy than previously estimated by Statistics SA. This confirms an observation we have made repeatedly that our official statistics continue to underestimate the size and rate of growth of our economy.

The employment figures we have cited signify that the democratic revolution is succeeding to make a qualitative break with the past with regard to issues important both to the working class and our society as a whole, the issues of labour absorption, employment and unemployment. However the quantitative imperative still remains that we increase the job creation rate to accelerate the decline in the level of unemployment.

Fully to understand what is happening to the economy, including the issue of employment, we will also have to make a serious effort to understand the informal sector - the so-called grey economy. (While there are currently an estimated 2.1 million businesses in South Africa, only 600,000 were in the formal sector.)

In this regard, a recent report by the economist, Mike Schussed, says more South Africans are working for themselves as entrepreneurs with one in six now self employed, whereas this figure in 2002 was one in seven.

Schussler said: "That's a huge increase. Partly it's survival, partly it's entrepreneurship. I think more and more people realise that they are not going to get rich working for someone else...The biggest challenge is how to bring people from the informal into the formal sector, so that they can not only pay tax but also be on a more even footing and get access to finance."

There is no doubt that the democratic revolution has also brought about an improvement in the standard of living of the working people, consistent with the objectives of the NDR to work to end poverty and underdevelopment and realise the goal of a better life for all, especially the poor.

For instance, gross earnings paid to employees in the formal non-agricultural business sector increased between the quarters ended September 2006 and December 2006. According to the December 2006 Quarterly Employment Statistics (QES) survey gross earnings paid to employees during the quarter ended December 2006 (October 2006 to December 2006) amounted to
R220,583 million. This represents a quarterly increase of R20,822 million or 10.4% compared with the quarter ended September 2006.

In a 2007 paper entitled "Wage Trends in Post-Apartheid South Africa:
Constructing an Earnings Series from Household Survey Data", Rulof Burger and Derek Yu say, among other things:

"The share of workers earning less than R400 per month decreased from 14 to 8.5%, while the percentage of those earning between R400 and R1,200 increased from 22 to 31%. It follows that except for the increase in mean earnings, many of the very lowest formal sector wage earners must have experienced an increase in their incomes between 1998 and 2005...

"Evidently, the earnings of unskilled and semi-skilled workers were slightly lower in 2005 than in 1995, whereas skilled earnings increased substantially over the same period. This is consistent with what one would expect to see in an economy with a shortage of skilled labour and an abundance of low-skilled unemployed (Altman 2005).

After a large decrease in their earnings between 1995 and 2002, unskilled wages have increased by 27% between 2002 and 2005, whereas the earnings growth of the highly skilled appears have slowed down."

In addition to this, the democratic state has worked consistently to expand the social wage especially for the benefit of the poor among our working people. In this regard, in the State of the Nation Address this year we said, "It is a matter of pride that, in line with our commitment to build a caring society, we have since 2004 improved service provision and other aspects of the social wage, (which includes social grants, housing, free basic services etc.)"

We must also remember that all workers have benefited from tax relief since 1996. The tax threshold in 1996 was R15,580. The tax threshold in the current year is R43,000. This means that employees earning less than R43,000 do not pay income tax. In 1996 rands, this amounts to about an additional R27,500 that is not taxed. Again this was done within the context of finding ways and means of improving the standard of living of the working people.

As we celebrate May Day, we will have to remind ourselves constantly that not surprisingly, given the fact of the entrenched legacy of colonialism and apartheid, the NDR has a continuing responsibility to pursue the goal of a better life especially for the working people.

Though we have made some progress in this regard, it is obvious that we still have a long way to go. Accordingly, wherever we may be on May Day, we should both celebrate the advances we have made, and chart the way forward with regard to the acceleration of our advance towards the achievement of the goal of a better life for all and the realisation of all the objectives of the NDR. We wish our workers and working people a happy May Day!