This week it's striking farm workers.
A month ago it was striking miners.
South Africa is seething with labor unrest, and it's not hard to see why. A recent al Jazeera article quoted an itinerant farm worker who has been working in the fields since the 1970's. Then he was making 45 Rand a day. Now he makes 65. While he has seen a 50% climb in his wage, inflation has increased the cost of living by almost 400% in the same period.
A doubling of the current wage won't even bring the farm workers back to the standard of living they had under the Apartheid regime. This can't go on indefinitely.
For all its socialist-sounding rhetoric the ANC has actually kept the country on a very neo-liberal IMF-friendly course. National debt as a percentage of GDP has been halved since the ANC came to power. That's good news for the bankers and the elite, both white and black, but pretty much irrelevant for the rest of the population.
The ANC continues to coast on the glories of their triumph over Apartheid, and that can't go on indefinitely either. Eventually they have to deliver more for the black majority.
That will inevitably set them on a collision course with the IMF/World Bank crowd.
No comments:
Post a Comment