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With the government and unions locked in battle, it is the workers who are paying the price - even with their lives, writes Annsilla Nyar
Life in South Africa of late is approaching a level of intensity which puts one in mind of Yeats's grim revelatory lines: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
We are experiencing shocking levels of crime, as typified by the St Tropez robbery and shooting in Durban.
The municipal rates hike has followed closely on the heels of the jump in the interest rate, putting many of us with our financial backs to the wall. Along with the recent increases in petrol and food costs, and recurrent protests about a lack of services, crisis-weary South Africans are now contending with the violence, lawlessness and suffering unleashed by the public sector strike.
The sense of things falling apart in the country is pervasive for South Africans. But nothing depicts our near state of "mere anarchy" more powerfully than the highly contested issue of essential services as it has predominated as a central motif in the ongoing protest action.
May 28 marked the beginning of one of the most massive strikes in South African history. Thousands of workers in essential services joined other public service workers in the strike organised by Cosatu in the effort to negotiate 12% wage increases and concomitant increases in housing and medical aid.
But South Africa has paid a bitter price for the loss of workers from many posts in the essential services sectors.
Although hospitals were planned to run on minimum service levels to ensure a basic minimum of health care, conditions of "mere anarchy" have reigned in the area of public health.
Ill or vulnerable people have been denied access to public health facilities, causing ugly scenes of violence, intimidation, suffering and death. Many seriously ill patients have been neglected or even summarily discharged.
KwaZulu Natal has been one of the hardest hit provinces in terms of the virtual crippling of public health facilities.
We have witnessed at close hand the chaos in health care as shown by the near non-functioning of provincial paramedics and ambulance services. The situation was as serious as to warrant the calling in of private emergency service personnel.
Several state hospitals, including King Edward VIII close to home, closed their doors to sick people needing medical care.
Incubators We saw critically ill patients and babies in incubators evacuated from state hospitals. We saw Durban pensioner Rajawanthee Beekhari lose her life as a result of being denied access to Adddington Hospital.
Public workers have achieved a lot during these past few weeks, but we have to ask ourselves at what cost these gains in the protest action have been advanced.
There is no doubt that striking workers deserve the requisite demands for a living wage and improved working conditions in public service.
They deserve more than 12%, in my opinion. But it cannot be denied that such demands as advanced by the essential service workers infringe upon people's most basic and fundamental right-to life. Juxtaposed against the right of essential service workers to strike is the competing right of patients to adequate health care. This is what makes the issue of essential services the weak spot in the protest action.
Consider labour law legislation. According to the Labour Relations Act, strike action by public servants in essential services is illegal.
Under labour law, essential services are those that society cannot do without because of the potential of loss of life.
Those that are truly essential - health, fire, police/correctional, air traffic, sanitation, electrical services - must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Only life-and-death matters are considered essential. But essential services have never been properly defined.
It is up to the CCMA to determine whether parts of a service or an entire service should be designated an essential service. The definition is fuzzy, allowing for confusion.
This lack of definition constitutes an area of weakness for the protest action, allowing the state to argue against the strike action on grounds of illegality.
Therefore, while labour law clearly disallows public servants in essential services to engage in industrial action, it is also understood that this clashes strongly with the constitutional right of all workers to strike.
According to the law, the grievances of public sector workers in essential services must be expressed through alternative channels. For example, each sector of the public service is committed to a minimum service agreement with the government which allows strike action as long as minimum service levels are maintained.
Minimum service levels are intended to create the conditions for a "controlled strike", allowing the right to strike while maintaining reasonable levels of public service.
This is another weak spot. Few minimum service agreements have been signed since the introduction of such legislation in the early 1990s. Talks between trade unions and the government to firm up these agreements have never been satisfactorily concluded and have continuously stalled, gained momentum during crisis moments, and then faded again.
It is absolutely crucial for the range of essential services to have been defined as narrowly as possible to ensure as few people are working as possible. Higher numbers on the streets mean a more prolonged (and bitter) strike.
Therefore, as it stands, it is illegal for workers in essential services to strike and the ensuing battles will have to be fought in court, making for prolonged and painful protest action.
The crucial negotiations around the issue of essential services needed to have been concluded and resolved months ago, before strike action took place. At least then it would place workers in a much stronger bargaining position than they are right now.
If the legal status of essential service workers had been resolved, it would have helped prevent the inevitable descent into violence and lawlessness which necessitated the shutdown of medical services.
Definition There would have been a clearly conceptualised and understood definition of the range of essential services needed to maintain a bare minimum of service, preventing chaos, and still engage in protest action from a position of leverage.
What this oversight has allowed is for the government to take the defensive, pointing to the inevitable outbreaks of violence and intimidation, painting workers as unruly and unreliable and, therefore, making their demands unreasonable.
So where do we go from here? What we have seen thus far is an example of highly disrespectful labour relations. The state has responded with arrogance and indifference to public workers. The package they have placed on the negotiating table is an example of astounding arrogance, particularly when juxtaposed against the profligacy and waste at state levels that we are aware of. Dismissals of striking workers are already at an advanced stage.
On the other hand, trade unions have not shown themselves to be mindful of the very real and sobering power dynamics of the battle at hand. The utterances of bravado we often hear from trade union quarters tend to fly in the face of basic bread- and-butter issues. People have to survive.
The resources which the state can command allow it to conduct itself in legal battles in ways which workers cannot. The state may well muster up legal resources to fight strikers on grounds of manslaughter for deaths that have occurred as a result of the action of health workers.
There are many ways in which thousands of workers will bear the costs, particularly those with family responsibilities and commitments, who will not be able to maintain strike action indefinitely without bleeding and breaking under the economic strain.
For some, the successful outcome of these negotiations will come too late. Beekhari will quickly become a forgotten statistic, a tiny footnote in the history of the strike. Thousands of workers will feel the pain. South Africa is burning, in as much as it ever has and more, as during apartheid when the country was being declared ungovernable.
The gloom and despair we feel as our old orders disintegrate into near-collapse around us is aptly echoed by Yeats's vision of historical change. "Surely some revelation is at hand," he argues.
From which quarters will it come? As both sides are now grimly locked behind their battle lines, it is difficult to envision viable prospects for resolution or even change.
Annsilla Nyar is a researcher at the Centre for Civil Society, based at the University of KwaZulu- Natal.
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