Johannesburg - The Growth, Employment and Redistribution
macroeconomic policy (Gear) has failed to meet all its targets, the National
Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) said on Sunday.
"Gear did not care about building South Africa's
domestic economy," said secretary general Irvin Jim.
He said gear was directly responsible for capital flights
about 20% of gross domestic product (GDP) leaving the country.
"We are the only country that extracts minerals without
beneficiation and diversification for both upstream and downs stream
industries.
He was speaking at the union's 25th anniversary rally in
Durban.
"We are just custodians of mineral rights, we celebrate
allocation of those mineral rights."
He said companies in the past 18 years have consistently
launched an attack to the working class and critical jobs have been outsourced
in the pretext of competitiveness.
"This meant that all workers' gains, benefits and
conditions some won during the dark days of apartheid have been under severer (sic)
attack."
He said companies imposed all forms of precarious work such
as labour brokers, temporary work, casualisation, contract work, used
technology to displace workers instead of bringing technology to make the jobs
of workers easy.
"The overall strategy is to continuously reduce the
cost of production and labour is seen as a cost to be reduced."
He said the fundamental question was: if companies embark on such a strategy that increases volumes of production but at the same time
destroys jobs, who was going to buy their product?