Job Loss Crisis

6 July 1999

Today’s application by the ERPM gold-mine to liquidate, with the loss of 5000 jobs, underlines the unemployment crisis in which we find ourselves as a society.  Despite revised figures indicating some GDP growth, and heartening signs of some recovery in the offing – including falling interest rates and a good balance of payments situation – the blood-letting on the jobs front continues unabated.

Virtually no sector of our economy has been spared.  Last year 90,000 mine-workers and 37,000 public sector workers lost their jobs.  Over the past five years some half million workers have been retrenched, a figure that is not remotely compensated for by some marginal job creation in tourism and certain other sectors.  The outlook on the mines for the rest of the year is bleak.  In Telkom (despite reassurances in 1996 in the midst of the restructuring process) major job losses are impending.

In Transnet, in the metal sector, in the catering sector jobs are being lost or are threatened.

Where “new” jobs are being created, they are often by way of contracting out and casualisation – they are often not new jobs as such, but the re-definition of work to the detriment of workers.

We have to focus urgently on the unemployment crisis as a nation.  This includes:

•  Implementing the October 1998 Presidential Job Summit resolutions with much greater resolve and urgency.  Perhaps the election campaign has played a role, but for whatever reason, there is a general impression that the Summit resolutions have been put on the back-burner for the past months.
• Taking other structures seriously – the Gold Crisis Committee being a case in point.  The SACP fully supports the outrage expressed by the NUM general secretary at the fact that the ERPM decision completely by-passed the Committee, which is due to meet this Thursday.
• Developing coherent industrial policy for all key sectors of the economy. Do we have a clear strategic vision of our mining sector, for instance?  Or is this sector simply to be the passive victim of the roller-coaster of international commodity prices?

The SACP believes that it is time that firm and decisive action needs to be taken by government and organised labour in particular to halt the slide into even deeper unemployment and poverty.

Issued by the SACP Department of Information & Publicity
General Secretary Dr.Blade Nzimande
E-Mail: sacp1@wn.apc.org
South African Communist Party Head Office
COSATU House
No. 1 Leyds Street - 7th Floor
Braamfontein 2001
Republic of South Africa
(Tel: 27 11 339-3621/2)
(Fax: 27 11 339-4244)