ANALYSIS: Deadly strike shows labour rules in South Africa

By Clare Byrne Sep 8, 2010, 8:18 GMT

Johannesburg - As South Africa's public servants began returning to work in earnest Wednesday, the cost of their 20-day strike, which they had suspended two days earlier, was starting to hit home.

There's the economic cost to begin with.

To end the shutdown of schools and neutering of public hospitals the government was forced to increase its 'final' offer four times, even while pleading broke.

Its final 'final' offer of a 7.5 per cent pay increase is more than twice the inflation rate of 3.2 per cent and adds around 7 billion rand (970 million dollars) to the state's wage bill, which already accounts for a third of the budget.

Given the double-digit wage increases already paid this year to workers at the state electricity and logistics companies, and the nearly-40-billion-rand cost of hosting the World Cup, something, analysts say, has to give.

South Africa has a small tax base. Only 5.5 million people or one in nine pay tax.

'This could mean fewer books for our schoolchildren or less on medicine for AIDS and we let people die. As a country we just cannot afford it,' economist Mike Schussler has predicted.

It could also delay programmes to electrify slums and build public houses, augmenting the frustration of the millions who still live in squalid tin shacks and who regularly riot over their living conditions.

'Let there be no confusion: the government blinked first, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, the main labour federation) has triumphed,' the country's Business Day newspaper concluded.

And yet despite having nailed a deal that comes within a percentage point of the workers demands of 8.6 per cent, union bosses weren't punching the air.

Instead, they have declared they are only suspending the strike for three weeks while they consider the offer and haggle for more.

If their response was muted, it's also because the unions know their win came at a heavy price for the sick and the youth.

Norman Mabasa, head of the South African Medical Association, a doctors group, estimated that 'tens....maybe even hundreds' of patients died as a result of being denied access to care or medication over the past month.

The strike has also dealt a further blow to a struggling education system.

Despite being Africa's richest country, South Africa has the continent's worst-performing education system, which, in turn drives official unemployment of 25 per cent.

After three weeks without classes, more school leavers are likely to flunk their final exams in two months' time, swelling the ranks of the jobless.

Finally, the strike also has far-reaching implications for the political future of the ruling African National Congress and its President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma's leadership was already in question after it emerged earlier this year the husband to three wives had fathered another child out of wedlock.

His chances of winning a second term as ANC leader in 2012 - given his laissez-faire attitude to the strike in the first two weeks - are now seen as slim.

The ANC also emerges seriously weakened. Until now, the ANC has counted COSATU, one of its partners in the ruling alliance, to stump for it at election time.

That alliance now appears to be in jeopardy as labour grows disenchanted with rampant corruption and misspending by Zuma's government.

COSATU president Zwelinzima Vavi last week lashed out at the 'powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas' who were 'increasingly using the state to get rich.' The alliance, he said, was 'dysfunctional.'