Labour unions have criticised KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi for suggesting that SA’s rising unemployment rate is the result of unions constantly pushing for higher pay for their members.
The unions said on Wednesday that Mkhwanazi should not scapegoat organised labour for a crisis rooted in government policies and structural flaws inherited from apartheid.
Cosatu’s parliamentary coordinator, Matthew Parks, said that for someone of his stature, Mkhwanazi had also benefited from union protection and labour laws over the years, adding that his job was “not to speak of the law but to implement it”.
During KZN premier Thami Ntuli’s stakeholder engagement on crime prevention on Tuesday, Mkhwanazi criticised the unions for contributing to high unemployment, saying the police, for instance, were unable to hire more officers due to unions demanding salary increases for their members.
“We need to interrogate this thing. Premier, you said this country is going down in front of our eyes; the reality is that we have too many things that are wrong in our country that contribute, and labour laws are one of those,” Mkhwanazi said.
“The population of KZN is growing, but the number of police officers is going down, thanks to the unions...[because of] the labour people who say, ‘We want salaries for our members’. So the more [the] government increases salaries, the less [people] they employ and the more [unemployment there is].”
Parks rejected this, saying SA’s crisis stemmed from structural flaws inherited from apartheid.
We’re the most unequal society in the world today because of those flaws. He [Mkhwanazi] says we are in a crisis today because workers get paid too much. We don’t know what planet he lives on,
— Matthew Parks, Cosatu’s parliamentary coordinator
“We’re the most unequal society in the world today because of those flaws. He [Mkhwanazi] says we are in a crisis today because workers get paid too much. We don’t know what planet he lives on.
“We’re in an economic crisis because Eskom struggled through state capture and corruption to provide affordable and accessible electricity. We’re in a crisis because Transnet, too, was broken by state capture and corruption... or because municipalities are being run by incompetent management,” he said.
Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) spokesperson Richard Mamabolo said the role of unions was not to create employment, but to defend the rights and dignity of workers, ensure fair remuneration, and protect the gains won through decades of struggle.
“To suggest that collective bargaining and calls for decent wages are the cause of joblessness is to misdiagnose the real problems confronting our society,” he said.
Mamabolo said it was “unfair and deeply misleading” to use unions as scapegoats.
“At a time when police officers and other public servants are working under extreme pressure, facing under-resourced environments, and putting their lives on the line daily, it is regrettable that senior officials choose to target unions instead of addressing the genuine needs of workers.”
SA Police Union spokesperson Lesiba Thobakgale said the union was ready to take Mkhwanazi through how SA’s labour laws were achieved. “We appreciate and acknowledge efforts made by Lt-Gen Mkhwanazi on fighting crime, and we encourage him to stay on his lane of crime fighting and leave labour laws alone,” he said.
The secretary-general of the SA Federation of Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, said Mkhwanazi's perspective risked distorting public understanding of a far more serious issue. That, he said, includes decades of neoliberal austerity and budget cuts that have hollowed out the police service, which he said was a crisis that deepened insecurity for all South Africans.
Budget cuts, not wage demands, were the real crisis, he said.
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