We are about to celebrate May Day. There are important connections between this May 1st holiday and the proposed amendments to key labour legislation, unemployment and climate change.Developing these connections is best begun by noting Labour’s very public outrage at some of the recently proposed amendments to both of the two principal pieces of labour legislation, the Labour Relations Act (LRA) and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA). Labour, however, was strikingly silent about a particular omission from the proposed amendments to the BCEA.
Everyone knows that the BCEA of 1997 set 45 hours as the standard work week. By contrast, very few people seem to know that the Act also requires ‘the progressive reduction’ of this standard to 40 hours per week and eight hours per day. After (almost) 15 years of being on the statute book, one could expect the Government to be saying something about the progress of this mandatory ‘progressive reduction’. Yet the amendments say nothing. And, more pertinently, nor do the trade unions. Why? Moreover, what does this have to do with May Day?
May Day is the internationally recognised labour day. Less well known, is that May Day commemorates the 1886 massacre of workers in the US – and the subsequent hanging of a worker leader. The American workers were striking for an 8 hour day; a claim first lodged in the US in 1866. International endorsement soon followed. Karl Marx championed the idea in Das Kapital, published in 1867.
One hundred and thirty three years after US workers first mooted a 8 hour day, COSATU took the lead, during the parliamentary process of the Basic Conditions Bill, in opposing the proposed 45 hour week. COSATU’s vigorous opposition resulted in the compromise of ‘the progressive reduction’ to 8 hours. But, at best, very little has been achieved in 15 years and nothing is being said about this, despite the manifest failure of the statutory requirement.
The most likely reason for Labour’s silence is the sheer size of unemployment and its seeming permanence. Unemployment was still high in 1997 – 22.9% – but the economy, as measured by GDP, was growing, for it was only in mid-1998 that the economy contracted. Labour had still to come to terms with the fact that ‘jobless growth’ was a structural feature of our economy. Apart from already having a very challenging programme, it is this daunting reality of a seemingly fixed ‘normal’ unemployment rate of some 25% and a much more accurate though unofficial rate of 40% that probably discourages trade unions from making demands about a 40-hour week, without any reduction in pay and/or loss of hard won benefits.
Climate change enters this picture as a crisis that, in world terms and a much longer time-frame, is even more serious than unemployment. While unemployment is devastating for the unemployed and their families and has a host of other deleterious psycho-social and economic consequences, climate change threatens life as we know it; all life. To be sure, climate change is incompatible with the future existence of our species.
Climate change demands climate jobs. Climate jobs are those specifically required to reduce the greenhouse gas that increasingly covers the world and, like a green house, allows heat in while preventing the trapped heat from escaping back into deep space. Above all, this means greatly reducing coal, oil and natural gas as the primary sources of energy. Climate jobs also involve the adaptations required as a consequence of the global warming that has already occurred and is known to be getting increasingly more alarming. Climate change, for instance, will increasingly be experienced as both severe floods and droughts. Serious droughts – in already water-scarce countries like South Africa – challenge us to make the necessary adaptations and preparatory resilience. And to do so NOW!
This means the urgent creation of a very large number of climate jobs. These jobs, which must be created to preserve our future, also and simultaneously affect our present. Having some 40% of us who are of working age without work – 70% amongst the youth – impacts on all of us in diverse ways.
Just how many climate jobs are needed in South Africa remains an open question. Further research will allow for more accurate ‘gestimates’ but the precise number is not a major issue. We already know more than enough to know that the number is large.
Preliminary research by the national One Million Climate Jobs Campaign (www.climatejobs.org.za) shows that the largely symbolic ‘one million’ is more than attainable. Already identified climate jobs include the following:
• Renewable energy (RE) 150,000+ (over 10 years)
• Manufacturing (in relation to RE) 38,000
• Housing (retrofitting) 22,000 (over 5 years)
• Housing (200,000 RDP houses per year using ecological methods) 8,700
• Ecological restorations 400,000
• Rainwater Harvesting 65,000
• Transport 460,000
• Waste 400,000
• Tourism 220,000
• Health 1,300,000
These are indicative numbers not precise ones. Not all of them are fulltime but all of them are envisaged as being ‘decent’. The most likely way of ensuring that they are decent is for them to be public, which, in most cases, would mean municipal jobs.
Decent wages are central to decent work. So, can we afford climate jobs? The simple answer is that we most certainly cannot afford not to have climate jobs. How does one put a price on saving our species along with unimaginable numbers of other species over which we hold dominion? Ultimately, it boils down to political will. Gautrain and the World Cup are immediate examples of cost being secondary to the goal.
We can again draw on research by the One Million Climate Jobs Campaign to provide evidence of how easy it could be to pay for 1 million climate jobs. Using a somewhat arbitrary wage of R6,000 a month and adding a further 40% to cover the other expenses of employment – including non-wage expenses – the Campaign’s research comes to a figure of R92 billion per year. Readily available funding sources far exceed this amount. Amongst the many sources identified are
• Idle corporate bank deposits R54 billion (10% of the total available)
• Financial transaction tax (of 0.25%) R48 billion
• Carbon tax (at R165/t CO2) R82 billion
• Halting Capital flight R100 billion +
The factor common to making all this realisable is political will. This ultimately means government. It is only governments that, acting on behalf of humanity, have the power and authority to do what science says, with increasing confidence and despair, must be done in the face of climate change. What must be done is far too important to leave to the vagaries of the market. The world is currently experiencing the consequences of a ‘market’ driven by profit maximisation compounded by short-termism. Those, who take pride in South Africa having escaped the worst ravages of market-madness, forget that one million extra South Africans have already joined the ranks of the unemployed, as a result of the global economic crisis. Moreover, 18 years of investor friendly macroeconomic policies first doubled unemployment and have then substantially failed to reduce it, despite tackling unemployment being a constant government priority.
What this all means is that we need something much more than the so-called green economy, which, whether by default or design, is little more than the green washing of capitalism.
Climate change demands the climate jobs that simultaneously reduce unemployment. The private sector is not suitable for these very public matters.
