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Labour Wrap:
A reader in Johannesburg provided a fresh glimpse of the automated future and it was terrifying, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap.
The glimpse was provided by the first fully automated hotel in the world that opened its doors this week. Only bed making remains a human activity.
Bell says he welcomes the technology, but is terrified by who controls it and the system in which it operates. This will cause untold misery to millions of people.
He also points out that the SA Post Office is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons. This potentially great public service now owes its suppliers hundreds of millions of rand.
The fault, Bell reiterates, does not lie with the workers or their unions. Over years, the postal unions have campaigned about claimed gross mismanagement and possible high level fraud and corruption. Nothing was done.
But Bell says that postal union members have now informed him that management has moved to cut out “non-essential expenditure”. One result is that managers at the head office in Pretoria no longer have toilet paper. How this development could reduce hundreds of millions of rands of debt, Bell finds “mind boggling”.
The same, he says, applies to a tip-off received from a public service unionist who informed him about a government minister, apparently tired of his leased luxury BMW sedan, who had his department lease a new Mercedes, giving him two luxury vehicles at taxpayers’ expense. He will follow this up.
Bell is also concerned that while Cosatu in the Western Cape has launched a provincial campaign against labour brokers, nothing has so far been done about the small army of casual workers that served Cosatu delegates at the Gallagher Estate last week. In his previous Inside Labour column, he mentioned this, along with the fact that the major shareholder in the conference centre is the Cosatu affiliated SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union.
While he feels that all these matters deserve more attention, Bell says he will concentrate in his Inside Labour column this week on the claimed “unity and cohesion” within Cosatu and the role, especially, of the SA Communist Party.
