The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) condemns the Democratic Alliance (DA)'s stunning attack on the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in its call for it to be frozen and not adjusted to protect it from inflation. This is an unashamed assault on the six million farm, domestic, construction, cleaning, security, hospitality and other workers dependent upon the NMW. COSATU and its predecessors fought over many decades to achieve a NMW. It was one of the key commitments of the African National Congress' Freedom Charter.
The NMW Commission is legally required by the Act to review and adjust the NMW annually to protect it from being eroded by inflation and to ensure it retains its poverty and inequality alleviation impact. The DA's call to impose a permanent freeze on the NMW is a call for the NMW Commission to break the law! It is stupendous that a Member of Parliament, who was there when Parliament passed the Act, can make such a call for government to break the law!
One would hope the DA would be aware of the rising cost of living and that inflation hits workers the hardest as they have no disposable income and the bulk of their meagre wages are spent on electricity, transport and food whose inflation rates far exceed CPI.
The NMW was introduced in 2019 after extensive negotiations between government, business and labour. Consensus was achieved between all parties on R20 as a starting point with transitional pegged rates for farm and domestic workers as well as exemption provisions for distressed companies. International best practise was researched including from the United States, Brazil, Europe amongst others where a NMW has been shown to reduce poverty and inequality and also helped to stimulate economic growth and job creation.
Since the NMW was introduced in South Africa in 2019, extensive research has been done by independent academic experts from the University of Cape Town amongst others, confirming that jobs have not been lost due to its introduction. Jobs, however, have been lost because of loadshedding, the deterioration of Transnet and municipal services, the COVID-19 pandemic amongst others but not because a domestic worker is now entitled to be paid a NMW of R27.58 an hour.
If the DA call to collapse the NMW was genuinely motivated by employers struggling to pay it, it would have provided proposals on existing provisions providing such employers exemptions. The Act specifically entitles any employer to apply for an exemption from the NMW, of 10% of its value for a year, provided that they have consulted workers and submit copies of their financial statements confirming such distress. Half of the employers applying for such exemptions have received them.
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Since the NMW came into effect in 2019, it has raised the wages of over 6 million highly impoverished and poorly paid workers, including farmworkers who a decade ago were paid as little as R6 an hour. It has been shown to have had a major impact upon reducing our painful apartheid legacies of poverty and inequality. The DA notion that workers are an elite who must be pickpocketed into poverty is an affront and disconnected from reality when each worker supports on average seven unemployed family members.
If paying workers a slave wage was a sound economic model that would miraculously create jobs, then we would not have inherited our massive levels of unemployment from the failed apartheid regime.
Workplaces will not be productive if workers are paid so little they must walk hours to get to work because they cannot afford transport. Neither will workers be productive if they buy the food or medication to keep their bodies healthy. Common sense asks who exactly will buy the goods local businesses produce, if we adopt the DA's call to pay workers peanuts? Unless we expect tourists to flood our shores to buy locally produced shoes, clothes, furniture and cars!
If the DA genuinely believed companies need to cut their salary bills to survive and grow, then it would have voted for the Companies Amendment Act in Parliament requiring listed and state-owned companies to disclose the wage gap and salaries of their highest and lowest earners. Of course, the DA did not, and in fact threatened fire and fury to stop any Bills interfering with CEOs' bloated salaries!
Workers can rest assured, the misguided attack on the NMW by the DA will not see the light of day. COSATU will defend the rights of workers to a minimum and a living wage.
