The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Nicolas Pons-Vignon -
Suggesting that workers, meaning those in low-level occupations, are overpaid, has become commonplace in South Africa. It is one facet of a broader line of argument, according to which, workers, especially black workers have been excessively well treated in the post-apartheid dispensation. The other facet of this argument is that this is not just a problem of attitude - one of entitlement justifying laziness, for instance - but also a cause of poverty, since overpaid workers keep others out...
Frank Meintjies -
Some workers earn nothing – they survive on tips. Some earn a daily rate that barely covers the costs of commuting to work and a square meal for the day. Then there are those who earn in the region of the median wage – about R3033 a month – but who fall prey to loan sharks and other debt collectors.
For these and many other reasons, South Africa cannot but consider a single statutory minimum wage. The mechanism has the potential to help stitch together the frayed edges of...
Dale T. McKinley -
If capital is to be believed, it is the worker who is the main source of South Africa’s contemporary social and economic problems.
Every time the annual season of wage negotiations is about to begin, as it is now, representatives of capital unleash a tsunami of propaganda about workers’ ‘high and unaffordable’ wage demands. Dire warnings of destructive social unrest/conflict, high inflation rates, poor competitiveness and generalised economic devastation roll off...
Worldwide the strategy for becoming more competitive in the global economy is to lower wages for an export economy. The problem that has arisen is that almost every country has done the same thing. Heiner Flassbeck is Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He has just released UNCTAD's 2012 annual report. It is essentially a report about inequality. It's not just that inequality is unfair --...
Saliem Fakir -
The average pay gap between Eskom’s top management and workers is 93% to 9%, but it’s the workers getting the flack for demanding more. A similar situation prevails in other parastatals.
The wage debate is pertinent after the World Cup has made us drink from the fountain of optimism about the potential for mutual solidarity.
But there will be little of it if workers and citizens feel, in general, that CEOs and managers of our parastatals earn excessively and have little to show...
