Director General of the ILO, Mr Juan Somavia;
Your Excellencies, Heads of State;
Minister of Labour, Mildred Oliphant;
Ministers of Labour from represented countries;
Leaders of the labour movement;
Leaders of organised business;
Esteemed guests;
I would like to thank the International Labour Organisation for having chosen South Africa to hold this important gathering.
We trust that you have received our warm South African hospitality since your arrival.
The issues that are going to be discussed here are critical to the economies of the African continent in particular and the international community in general.
We in particular welcome the theme of the conference which is “Empowering Africa’s Peoples with Decent Work’’, as this is a key policy priority for our government.
Placing decent work firmly on the African agenda encourages countries to consider how their national policies can reflect decent work.
To many people, the idea of decent work in Africa may seem like a pipedream given the history of our continent, which has endured periods of slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and forced labour.
Africa is still working to extricate herself from that painful legacy. Through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, our socio-economic blueprint, the continent is charting a new path of development and progress.
This path should naturally not leave the African workers behind. As South Africans we ensured that we include worker rights in the Constitution of the Republic.
The inclusion of worker rights in the Constitution was not by accident. It was due to the pivotal role played by the labour movement in our country, in fighting colonial oppression and apartheid.
The labour movement decided that there could be no freedom on the shop floor without political freedom.
The workers of our country therefore earned their place in the Constitution of the country.
We are currently working together as government, labour, business and the community sector to achieve inclusive economic growth and development, so that we can have the decent jobs we seek.
This is being done in a difficult economic climate globally, as uncertainty continues in Europe and the United States, and economic slowdown is anticipated in those two regions.
In attending to economic growth, we also need to look at the challenges facing Africa with regards to skills and human resource development in general.
Many African countries have experienced an under-utilisation of labour, an outflow of skilled labour, low levels of development of manufacturing activity and a reliance on resources.
Most importantly, the Decent Work Agenda in Africa cannot ignore the widespread poverty that characterises the continent.
The share of the world’s poor living in Africa has increased over the past two decades.
The United Nations Development Programme report released in 2010 dealing with the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) suggests that Africa will have to create 100 million productive jobs in order to reduce the number of working poor.
Therefore, governments have to play a critical role in promoting decent work in Africa by setting up appropriate development policies and ensuring regional and continental economic cooperation in ways that promote jobs.
More importantly, to promote decent work in Africa will require coordinated policies that make employment the main priority.
In South Africa we have identified that the central and most pressing challenges we face are unemployment, poverty and inequality. We have to substantially reduce social and economic inequality.
To deal with the three challenges - unemployment, poverty and inequality - we have to accelerate economic growth and transform the quality of that growth.
Our policy spells out clearly that our most effective weapon in our campaign against poverty is the creation of decent work, and creating work requires faster economic growth.
We have formulated a New Growth Path framework which we believe will help us boost growth and create jobs. We have a target of five million jobs by the year 2010.
There are a few elements to this strategy. One is to implement trade and industrial policy to create decent work on a large scale. We have to create a more inclusive economy, by expanding opportunities for the poor to access the labour market and broadening the impact of growth.
We are also strengthening competitiveness and promoting small and medium-sized enterprises and co-operatives.
In addition, we are ensuring that the country keeps up with global technological trends and fully exploits our comparative advantages.
We already see positive results from some of the programmes we are undertaking to stimulate production and promote growth.
For example, the localization imperative in our procurement policies is yielding results in a number of sectors.
An important example was the awarding of 72% of the recent Antiretroviral drugs tender to local companies that will result not only in the growth of this sector locally, but also in significant savings for government.
The localisation and supplier development programmes within some state-owned enterprises is also bearing fruit.
For example, we have a commitment from Transnet, our transport enterprise, to ensure that 90 of the 100 locomotives they are buying this year will be manufactured in South Africa.
We look forward to the new preferential procurement regulations that will come into effect on 7th December 2011, which will further strengthen our localisation drive.
These regulations will empower our Department of Trade and Industry to designate specific industries, of critical and strategic importance, where tenders should prescribe that only locally manufactured products will be considered, or that only locally manufactured products with a prescribed minimum threshold for local content will be considered.
Other countries would have their own formula but we are in the main facing similar challenges, in varying degrees of intensity, given the different backgrounds of African countries.
Ladies and gentlemen,
We are also aware that economic growth alone is unlikely to be sufficient to empower Africa’s people through providing new job opportunities.
Many other, complementary initiatives will be needed.
These include supporting the informal sector and providing bridging programmes between the informal and formal sectors, moving towards improved social security for the African peoples and paying attention to education and skills development.
As you point out as the ILO, as follows; “If all countries stimulate their domestic activity, primarily through employment and social protection, two direct ways to support aggregate demand, then global growth and trade will recover. This implies a central focus on employment and social protection in short-term fiscal and monetary policies. And macroeconomic policy should explicitly target employment and social protection objectives in order to accelerate a recovery.”
As part of attempts to achieve this vision which is in line with our national vision, we are building a developmental state with the strategic, political, administrative and technical capacity to give leadership to these development goals.
We are also consciously improving expenditure on the social wage, including access to health services, education, social security, transport and municipal infrastructure. We expect to see results in terms of human development as well as infrastructure in the long term.
When we look beyond our borders to the continent, stimulating employment will also require the creation of a supportive environment.
Such a supportive environment includes the development of a proper infrastructure.
The African Union’s infrastructure development programme is championed by heads of state in the different regions to ensure high level support.
South Africa champions the North-South corridor, especially the development of road and rail. This, coupled with intensive regional economic community development programmes, will put the continent in good stead for economic growth and jobs.
We hosted the Second Tripartite Summit in June 2011, to discuss the regional integration of SADC - East African Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
This integration will create a market of 26 countries with a combined population of nearly 600 million people and a total GDP of approximately 624 billion US dollars. One of the greatest spin offs should be jobs and an improved quality of life for the peoples of these regions.
While Government needs to play a central role in creating the conditions for economic growth, it is also incumbent on the social partners to move from dialogue to partnership in tackling job creation.
In implementing the Decent Work agenda in Africa, we also need strong international agencies to provide guidance and technical support now more than ever.
There are many challenges in the labour market and many vulnerable workers that need the standards and services provided by the ILO.
We appreciate therefore that you have decent work as a priority as it means we have a strong partner indeed in the ILO.
Finally, African countries will have to find new and improved methods of cooperation at regional and continental level to ensure that we have complementary economic and social policies.
It will only be through working together on the continent that we will be able to empower Africa’s people with decent work.
It is my pleasure to declare this conference open. I wish you well in your deliberations.
I thank you.
