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Chapter 5 - Trade Unions, Technology and Skills
- Edited by Malehoko Tshoaedi, Christine Bischoff, Andries Bezuidenhout
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- Book:
- Labour Disrupted
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2023, pp 119-134
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
The skills issue has historically been central to the formation of the trade union movement in South Africa and has been informed by racial divisions within the broader society. The history of the skills question in South Africa is a history of exclusion and inclusion shaped by political developments during specific periods of South African history. According to Gerald Kraak (1993), the predominantly African trade unions which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s did so alongside an established trade union movement which represented largely skilled white, coloured and Indian workers who were often hostile to the new unions.
In a context of sanctions that affected the South African apartheid economy during the 1980s, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) commissioned several studies under the Industrial Strategy Project to investigate ways of improving the country's manufacturing performance. The skills question arose within the unions during this period of various attempts at seeking to rebuild the economy while enhancing the skills of workers and the broader population.
The labour movement had conceptualised South Africa's post-apartheid skills development dispensation since the early 1990s, and embarked on various initiatives to strengthen its capacity to engage on matters of economic restructuring. These include Cosatu's Economic Trends Research Group, Numsa's Vocational Training Project and its Research and Development Groups which sought to articulate a vision for industrial, economic and skills training policies. As Bhabhali ka Maphikela Nhlapho (2019, 58) states, ‘in our country it was the labour unions that sought the change in skills-development processes and advised the new democratic government that it needs to depart from the practices of the apartheid state’.
The skills debate is rooted in the larger political and ideological contestations about the ideology of competitiveness and the future of struggle in the unions. Numsa's adoption of skills-based grading systems was heavily contested within unions, and was seen to be a departure from ideas of emancipatory education that had formed part of the popular vision of trade unions for a post-apartheid skills development dispensation (Kodisang 2018). This departure was influenced largely by the changing global balance of forces and the influence of a small group of intellectuals within the unions.
The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to Klaus Schwab (2016, 37), builds on the third industrial revolution by introducing artificial intelligence – that is, software technologies that make computers or robots perform tasks similarly to or better than human beings.
Chapter 13 - SKILLS DEVELOPMENT in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Issues, Arguments and Contestations
- Edited by Enver Motala, University of South Africa
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- Book:
- Education, Economy & Society
- Published by:
- University of South Africa
- Published online:
- 16 February 2020
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2014, pp 244-264
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Summary
Introduction
South Africa's transition from the apartheid system to a post-apartheid democratic system began in a historical moment that coincided broadly with the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union and the ushering in of a new global order of capitalist economic domination often referred to as the ‘unipolar’ world system. This moment was followed by large-scale global capitalist restructuring which pressured many developing countries to embrace neoliberal economic policy reforms.
The post-apartheid state ushered in a period of wide-scale reform of public policies, amongst which were reforms to the country's education and training systems. These reforms were proposed as a means to begin to redress the historical imbalances created by apartheid's racialised labour market, which had resulted in what McGrath, Badroodien, Kraak and Unwin (2004) have characterised as a ‘low skills regime’. A key challenge facing the new government was to develop policies that could address this historical legacy while simultaneously overseeing the integration of the South African economy into a hostile global capitalist economic system. This resulted in an expectation that the post-apartheid state would develop policies that will redress the historical imbalances that occurred as a result of apartheid. Scholars such as Motala, Vally and Spreen (2010:241) have argued:
At the end of apartheid there was a real expectation that the death of a racist, fragmented, incoherent, yet planned education and training system together with its policies and practices – the manufactured bureaucracies spawned to give effects to the intentions of apartheid ideologues and political leaders and its deleterious outcomes, would be terminated once and for all.
In light of the various, conflicting pressures for policy reforms from domestic and global forces, the democratic government has chosen contradictory approaches to development. These are directed at redressing the historical imbalances, on the one hand, and economic and social policy choices that have so far been unsuccessful in transforming the character of the South African economy, on the other. The discourse on skills development therefore is an expression of ideological and political contestations emerging within this broader framework of policy development in the period of the political transition. My contention is that the prevalence of human capital theory assumptions on skills as evidenced in the broad acceptance of outcomes-based education (OBE) reforms and the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in the post-apartheid state have contributed immensely to the current situation defined as a crisis of skills development.