The barbarity of wage-slavery
cc Mphutlane wa Bofelo comments on the ‘barbarity of wage-slavery’, after confronting working conditions at a hotel in Mauritania, where staff work long hours for meagre wages. This situation prevails in the restaurant and hotel industry throughout the world, writes wa Bofelo, with big South African companies ‘paying their workers as little as three hundred rand per month and some who do not give a salary at all, paying their labourers with the tips from their clients’. Wa Bofelo is disturbed that ‘even Muslim-owned businesses have resorted to this… practice of employing people without a salary’. Halaal certification, wa Bofelo argues, should take into account labour-relations practices, labour rights and human rights culture, not just whether a enterprise is Muslim-owned or has prayer facilities.
‘The choice is no longer between socialism and capitalism. It is between capitalism and barbarism.’
I recalled Claude Ake’s poignant statement on my recent trip to Mauritania where I had gone for the annual Maulud-Nabi celebrations organised by the Tripoli-based World Islamic Call Society. The working-hours and conditions of the workers at the hotel where I stayed reflected in very brute terms the barbarity of wage-slavery. It also captured the horrendous way in which capitalism de-personalises the human being, not only by turning labour (and therefore the labourer) into a commodity, but by also making labourers the property of the propertied.
The workers at this hotel have no working hours, they work from dawn until ‘there is no business’ – which can be until dawn, as was the case for the duration of our stay at that hotel. These workers left their homes from as early as three o’clock to four o’clock in the morning and worked the whole day, without any break and knocked off only when there was no longer any customer to serve. As there were hundreds of us from various parts of the world, for the entire week we were there, the knock-off time was most of the time one o’clock to three o’clock in the morning.
This means that in most instances the workers did not even get the time to go to their homes. Chatting to these workers, mostly from Senegal and other neighbouring countries, it was clear to me that their remuneration is a pittance. In the actual fact, these labourers rely heavily on the generosity of the clients in the form of tips given for their services.
This situation prevails in the restaurant and hotel industry throughout the world. In South Africa, you have big companies paying their workers as little as three hundred rand per month and some who do not give a salary at all, paying their labourers with the tips from their clients. The tragic thing for me as a Muslim is that even Muslim-owned businesses have resorted to this barbaric practice of employing people without a salary. In some of these restaurants, none of the staff are officially employed, there are no terms of employment, and no clear job-descriptions. The workers derive their salary only from the tips given by the clients. As a result of the fact that these workers are there only on the basis of a vague verbal agreement. You cannot even call them casual workers. These are simply people who are at the mercy of shrewd and heartless capitalists because of the desperate situation they find themselves in.
The unfortunate reality is that these exploiters and oppressors thrive on the liberalisation of trade and labour regimes by a government led by former freedom-fighters, including lip-service communists. The irony of the matter is that government institutions and public enterprises were the first to practice the casualisation of labour, by outsourcing some of their labourers to private capital. We have a situation where cleaning in public hospitals and the security at some police stations has been outsourced to secondary employers. This is just a nice way denying the workers all the rights that full-time employment accords them, and the smartest way of making it difficult for workers to be unionised and to have bargaining power.
But the million-dollar question for me is how is it possible for restaurants who use unpaid labour and have no working-hours for these unpaid labourers to still pass off as ‘halaal’ restaurants? Is being Muslim-owned and having salaah (prayer) facilities in the restaurant the only criterion for an enterprise to be declared halaal? What about its labour-relations practices, labour rights and human rights culture? Are these small matters not considered by the Shariah? Is the Jacob Zuma administration going to do anything about casualisation of labour as it promised in its manifesto? We wait with baited breath.
* Mphutlane wa Bofelo is a writer-activist with a passion for using creative education, literature and theatre as tools for transformation and development.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.