Special Note: Happy 37th Anniversary to COSATU. Formed December 1985
13 March 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) made its presentation to Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance and calls upon the National Assembly to reject the Democratic Alliance (DA)'s reckless Responsible Spending Bill. The DA's Bill is a shocking attempt to impose brutal 10% plus salary cuts on nurses, teachers, police officers and other hard working and low paid public servants for the next 4 years and beyond.
The DA Bill drafted and tabled at Parliament proposes that for the next four years when the debt to gross domestic product ratio is:
Under 55%, public servants receive a 1% increase on average.
Between 55% and 60%, public servants receive a 0% increase.
Over 60%, public servants receive a 5% increase.
The DA Bill delinks increases in wages for cleaners, nurses and correctional service officers and other public servants from being pegged to inflation and be linked instead to the economy's growth rate. This will mean that under a DA administration, public servants would see on average a 10% plus reduction in their wages each year for the next decade.
It is to the DA's discredit that the Bill ignores the very comfortable salaries of its Members of Parliament, the Provincial Legislatures and Municipal Councils. It is to the DA's shame that it has voted against the progressive Companies Amendment Bill currently before Parliament that requires listed companies and State-Owned Enterprises to disclose the salaries and gap between what they pay their highest and lower earners to their shareholders and the public as part of reducing the painful apartheid wage and moving South Africa to a fairer wage regime.
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The public service wage bill despite misleading scarecrows flighted by some, is not ballooning, in fact it has fallen from 35% to 31.7%. We should be worried about the declining public service headcount ratio when we had 1 million public servants servicing 34 million South Africans in 1994, to 1.2 million public servants today for a population that has nearly doubled to 62 million. This declining head count has placed great strain upon the ability of the state to provide the quality public services that working class communities and the economy depend upon.
The Bill is a brazen attempt to collapse workers' hard-won rights to collective bargaining which are enshrined in the Constitution and thus would not pass constitutional muster.
The solution to managing the debt, is to grow the economy, fix Eskom and Transnet and other critical State-Owned Enterprises, rebuild the state, provide relief for the poor and unemployed. Pickpocketing paramedics and doctors will not only plunge them into debt but in fact spark a brain drain of skilled public servants from the state to the private sector and overseas.
Parliament should not waste time on this anti-worker Bill tabled by the DA but rather dismiss it as the populist election pamphlet it is.
