Labour Wrap: Getting to grips with definitions

Cape Town -  There was an international agreement signed this week between French petro-chemicals giant, Total and the IndustriALL Global Union.  It guarantees union recognition and equal wages and conditions in Total operations worldwide.  This, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap, amounts to the overdue beginnings on a global scale of what trade unions have achieved at most national levels.

He also raises another aspect of the global reality that directly affects South Africa:  the chronic shortage of nurses.  This was highlighted by the Democratic Organisation of Nurses (Denosa) in a post conference statement this week.  

While calling for more and better training, the union critcised the low pay and poor conditions that nurses in South Africa have to endure.  Bell notes that Denosa has listed pay and conditions as the main reason that more than 30 000 South African nurses now work abroad, many in the Gulf states and Europe.

This week campaigning lawyer Richard Spoor also highlighted the human suffering caused by the ongoing shambles at the Workmens’ Compensation Commission.  This, says Bell, is an area that the labour movement should have taken up much more consistently and seriously. He has dealt, in the past, with the compensation commission, its antiquated legislative framework and bungling bureaucracy and pledges to take these matters up again.

However, for this week’s Inside Labour column, he feels it is necessary to “go back to basics” in terms of definitions.  This because one of the Davos elite at the World Economic Forum referred to countries such as China as “state-directed capitalism” while many in the labour movement see them as “socialist” and the business community has tended to categorise them as “communist”.

And the super rich at Davos did not seem averse to state intervention in the economy that both sides in the past either derided or hailed as socialistic.  We really should decide what we are talking about, says Bell.