Input to International Transport Workers Federation by the General Secretary - 02- 08 - 06

 

Dear brothers and sisters, comrades and friends,
First, let me welcome to South Africa the representatives of transport workers around the world.

We are pleased and honoured that you have chosen South Africa for this historic meeting. We know your deliberations will take forward the cause of workers around the world, and hope that you will enjoy your visit in the interim.

We are particularly pleased to welcome you to South Africa because we remember the critical role that the transport workers showed in the fight for liberation in South Africa. Transport workers played a central role in the effort to isolate the apartheid regime and in showing workers’ solidarity with our struggle.
Today, your presence here reflects the triumph of humanity, and especially of working people worldwide, over the tyranny of apartheid. It is part of our continued celebration of the victory and power of international solidarity.

We hope that while you are here, you will come to learn more about the progress we have made since 1994, and the challenges that we still face. Workers have made huge advances thanks to the 1994 breakthrough. But we still face the problems common to countries of the South – mass unemployment, low pay, and dependence on uncertain world markets.

For workers, the transition to democracy brought political freedom. We are striving to ensure real democracy, where workers and the poor have a voice in government at all levels, not just elections every few years.
Democracy also ensured that workers in South Africa have the full range of labour rights, in contrast to the days of apartheid when black workers were oppressed and exploited by the combination of the state and employers.
Above all, all workers now have the right to organise unions and strike both in the workplace and across the country to support broader, political demands. We as COSATU see this exercise of workers’ power as central to ensuring our democracy responds to the needs of workers and the poor.

The democratic state has also begun to overcome the backlogs in basic services to black communities, which under colonialism and then apartheid were denied decent housing, water, electricity, adequate education and health. True, black communities still lag behind the historically white suburbs. But progress has been real, although slower than we might have hoped 12 years ago.

Despite this progress, in the economy workers and the poor remain largely marginalised and oppressed. In that, we are like workers across the South, with the added burden of the massive inequalities left by apartheid.
Today, 40% of our people suffer from unemployment. Two thirds of Africans under 30 years old can’t find a job.
Even those who find work often suffer poverty and oppression by the bosses. Half of all union members earn less than R2500 a month – that is, about 350 US dollars – and half of all non-union members earn under R1500 a month, which is just over 200 US dollars a month. Moreover, a survey by COSATU last year showed that one African worker in seven still faces racial abuse at work.

Finally, a particular challenge for Africa, and especially southern Africa, is HIV and AIDS. Transport workers are particularly at risk, as you know. For us, a crucial problem has been the high cost of treatment and the failure of the public health system to meet the needs of our people. As a result, AIDS in South Africa remains a class question, where the rich get treatment and the poor die young and unnecessarily.

Certainly the problems workers face in South Africa arise in large part from the deep inequalities imposed under apartheid. But they also result from the broader challenges that all countries in the South confront. Around the world, billions of workers face unemployment and, if they find work, starvation wages, insecurity, long hours and unsafe conditions.

Today, we face a new threat – that the trade rules set at the WTO will make it impossible for countries in the South, like South Africa, ever to develop more advanced and equitable economies. We could be condemned to being providers of raw materials as well as tourist hotspots for the rich, without any hope of improving the lives of our people in the longer run.

The current proposals would require extensive cuts in tariffs by middle-income developing countries. That, in turn, will make it virtually impossible for them to industrialise further. There is extensive evidence that today’s rich countries used very high tariff levels to develop their manufacturing industries. Europe, the US and Japan all used higher tariffs than most developing countries to establish their industry through the 19th and 20th Centuries.

On agriculture, the current proposals would have little real impact on access by developing countries. In any case, most African farmers lack the marketing networks and resources to expand export production. In these circumstances, the evidence suggests the overall impact of the Doha round would actually be negative for Africa as a whole.

On services, current proposals from the EU and the US seek liberalisation in key areas such as finance, retail and telecommunications. Experience to date suggests that opening basic services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services makes it harder to maintain a strong public sector and to subsidise the poor to support universal access.
All of these proposals taken together would make it impossible for the countries of the South to pursue a strong development strategy that would benefit workers and the poor. In the absence of such a strategy, extraordinarily high levels of un- and underemployment would persist, with the accompanying downward pressure on wages and union organisation. That can only threaten the international labour movement, not just those of us who are directly affected.

We wish you all the best in your work here as we fight together for a better world for working people. We are sure that your meeting here will help the international labour movement develop a coherent strategy to address these challenges. We need to find common demands around the rules for international trade and finance that will provide space for the economies of the South to develop. At the same time, we must ensure that the costs of adjustment in the North are not borne by workers and the poor.