Volume 11, No.2 - June-August 2002

Public service restructuring:

Revolutionary transformation or neo-liberal retreat?

By Moloantoa Molaba, NEHAWU national spokesperson

NEHAWU, together with other COSATU unions, has been engaged in a protracted struggle to transform the public service, from a narrow oppressive machine responsive to the needs of one third of the population, to a central instrument for meeting RDP social goals and working class expectations raised by 1994 democratic breakthrough.

In the earlier phase of this mammoth task the progressive unions and the new democratic state had more or less a joint platform. It was only with the implementation of GEAR that we began to see government retreating from its earlier revolutionary vision to an approach which was more amenable to the neo-liberal concept of public service transformation.
COSATU unions on the other hand began to adopt a more robust and confrontational line in order to advance its vision.

Public service transformation

The RDP base document broadly defined the goals of public service transformation. This vision was then translated into a White Paper on Public Service Transformation.
These were later fought for and won in the historic 2001 Public Service Job Summit held in Petersburg/Polokwane.
The following are the key areas of transformation:

Pre-GEAR era and transformation

The radical vision of public service of public service transformation captured in the White Paper on Public Service Transformation implied increased social expenditure on services such as pensions, salaries and conditions of service, health, welfare and the criminal justice system. In other words it meant a big public service.

From 1994 to mid-1997 a lot of progress was made towards realising this vision, i.e. closing the apartheid wage gap, merging Bantustans administrations into ten national departments, developing and implementing a fair and non-discriminatory grading system for all public servants across the old apartheid and Bantustan administrative grades.

For instance the current national Health Department resulted from merging 14 previous health departments. This took tremendous effort, resource planning and dedication.
While this was happening there was also a concerted effort to extend services that were previously a monopoly of whites and urban dwellers, to rural and working-class communities. This meant building more schools and clinics, connecting more water and electricity and improving and equalising access to pensions. Through the public sector and increased social expenditure, we were beginning to liberate the majority of South Africans.

GEAR, rise of the private sector and public service transformation

But unfortunately the adoption of GEAR in 1996 and its subsequent implementation saw a gradual movement away from underlying revolutionary principles guiding public service transformation. The Department of Public Service and Administration and the Treasury started talking about building a 'minimalist state', with a view to meeting the stringent fiscal and monetary objectives of GEAR.
It was argued that the public service was bloated and this was crowding out foreign direct investment (FDI). So we needed to reduce the role of the state in order to create a good environment for FDI by outsourcing, commercialising, privatising, etc.

Instead of closing the apartheid wage gap, we heard talk about containing personnel costs and competing with private sector in managers' salaries. This widened the wage gap and reversed the gains we made in 1994 -1998.
The 1999 public service strike was the first class-conscious action to try to put a halt to this slide towards this neo-liberal restructuring of public service.

The main causality of this new policy was service delivery. The earlier and ambitious departmental plans to create jobs and extend services to rural communities and the unemployed workers were simply abandoned or had to be abruptly scaled down because of budget cuts. In a hospital ward where you had 4 cleaners and 16 nurses, now you had to have two cleaners and 5-10 nurses.

This translated into a declining quality of health care and dirtier hospitals. The capitalist media then used the declining standards in hospitals and, in part, the public broadcaster, the SABC, to say public servants are lazy and we need the private sector to rescue tax-paying South Africans.
So this created a fertile environment to attack the public service while laying the ideological basis for society to accept profit-driven entities into it.

Managers were now encouraged to look at creative ways to contain costs while maintaining the same level of service, while in other instances they were allowed to save, even if it meant curtailing services in the name of rationalisation.
This has opened the floodgate for private-sector and profit-driven entities to seek to dismantle the public service. For instance, Metrorail security, payouts of pensions, kitchens in hospitals have all been privatised.

The interesting thing in all these developments is that the private sector has still not brought about any marked service improvements. Instead we have heard more complaints from citizens about delays in pension payouts, lack of security in trains, increased stealing of train cables, etc.

In response Metrorail management and the Minister of Social Development are considering re-insourcing or allowing public servants to run these services. In other words we are seeing some moves towards re-nationalisation.

Restructuring agreement

The current public service agreement, signed by all COSATU unions, must be seen and interpreted within this background. This agreement is a detailed plan, with procedures that will be used to transform public service in line with the Petersburg/Polokwane Public Service Job Summit Agreement.
The agreement is divided into two phases. The most important is that unions and management undertake joint processes. Each national department and provincial administration is expected to develop a strategic plan that will show how many workers they need for what service and what resources they have at hand to employ them.

Then the joint union/employer structures will subject these plans to negotiations around deployment, redeployment, training etc. So the main focus of these structures will human resource utilisation.
We are convinced that by using these structures correctly we will never reach the second phase, which provides for voluntary severance packages and possible retrenchments.
The key challenge for unions is to have research capacity to analyse and, if there is some hidden neo-liberal agenda, refute management plans. Unions must be able to independently prove or disprove certain management plans. This means we must have vigilant workers' leaders with strong administrative/technical support.

Conclusion

The current agreement has not completely defeated the creeping neo-liberal conception of public service transformation but at least it has contained it.
This has given progressive forces a chance to reverse the impact of GEAR on service delivery, while actually making new ground in reaching transformation in line with the RDP and the White Paper.

In favour of progressive forces are the expansionary budgets of the last two years, which have started to increase social expenditure and given some resources for filling posts, etc.
The potential of revolutionary public service transformation is real but equally things can go terribly badly if the agreement does not and it cannot guarantee that there will be no retrenchments at all. Either way workers must remain mobilised to defend their jobs.