Education for Liberation

The Center for Labour Education and Organising

Khaya College has a long history of working with trade unions and other workers organistions on matters
affecting workers. The Center for Labour Education and Organising is a product of this long history.

Cheap black labour lay at the heart of the apartheid system. For black workers, this meant only menial jobs, extraordinarily low wages, long working hours, non-existent health and safety measures, no protection against
the most arbitrary of management practices, and often, racially motivated physical and verbal abuse at the
hands of fellow white workers.. It was only with the emergence of the independent trade union movement of
the 1970s that black workers began to make any meaningful gains in wages and other conditions of employment. By the time of the first democratic elections of 1994, however, South Africa continued to boast the second
biggest income disparities in the world. It remained notorious for its labour standards for the majority of its workers, most of
whom were unorganised.

The democratic elections in 1994 came at a time when the processes of globalisation had wrought major changes in the world
of work. It is estimated that over 1 million workers have lost their jobs due to retrenchments and company closures in the last decade. This has led to the growth of the informal sector, which is characterized by survivalist activities ranging from self-employment to street workers employed to sell fruit and sweets on sidewalks. The sector consists mainly of women, and they presently enjoy no rights.

The rise of atypical work

Within the world of work itself, there has been the rise of atypical work, with a rapid growth in the use of casual and contract labour, as well as the emergence of home based work. So pervasive is this development that in some workplaces, casual
workers outnumber the permanent workers by a ratio of 7 to 3. This is happening across the different sectors of the economy. Again, the majority of these workers are women. They have no job security and are excluded from benefits permanent
workers enjoy, such as medical aid or provident fund membership. Often they work unsociable hours, with all the attendant
dangers to their safety, especially for the women workers. While recent government legislation has extended some rights to
these workers, they face extraordinary problems. The bulk of them are not organized, even in the sectors where there are big, national unions operating. These leaves them ignorant of their rights, incapable of challenging their casual or contract status and consequently open to severe exploitation.

After 1994 the new government adopted a strategy of “regulated flexibility” in its reform of the apartheid labour market.
According to the government, this strategy was designed to make the South African economy more internationally competitive
on the one hand, but also to improve and protect workers’ labour standards on the other. There has been much debate within
the labour movement whether the two objectives are indeed compatible. The state has subsequently passed several labour laws informed by the need for greater labour flexibility. The result has been a dimunition of rights workers had previously won under apartheid. An example is the new Basic Conditions of Employment Act. The old BCEA, passed by the apartheid government,
actedas a floor of minimum rights for workers. No employer could give workers less rights than those stipulated in the Act. The
new BCEA, while definitely giving workers such as casuals some rights and protection, no longer acts as an absolute floor of minimum rights. Quite the contrary. It actively encourages a system of ‘downward variation’, whereby workers end up with less rights than those prescribed in the Act.

The state’s macro economic strategy prescribes cuts in all social services, from housing to health, to transport, to education and social welfare. The result of this has been a serious decline in workers’ social wage. This is happening in a context where jobs are scarce, the number of unemployed dependents has grown, and wages and labour standards generally are under attack.

All the various developments described above are taking place against a backdrop where the traditional unions are not
responding particularly energetically to the many problems. Casual and contract workers abound not only in the sectors
dominated by big, national unions but often in the very workplaces organized by them, to the point where they can in fact be in the majority. Yet, the established unions have done very little to organize these workers and those in the informal sector.

Partly in response to the fragmenting effects of globalisation and partly in response to the inability of the established unions to organize the atypical workers, there has been an explosion of independent trade unions since the early 1990’s.

Southern Africa

The aims of the Center

1. Investigate labour standards in South Africa
2. Focus on unemployed workers, atypical workers such as casual and contract workers, other vulnerable workers such as farm and domestic workers, as well as informal sector workers within this general framework
3. Undertake activities such as advocacy, lobbying and popular education to draw attention to labour standards issues
4. Engage in these activities that will strengthen attempts to organize vulnerable workers
5. Generally work in a way that will contribute towards such workers securing greater labour rights, and
6. Over time shift the activities within the Center onto a Southern African regional footing.