Yesterday was Workers’ Day. As we enjoyed yet another day off in our calendar of public holidays, few of us are cognisant of the history behind this important day.
May Day was born from the industrial struggle by various socialist and labour movements for an eight-hour working day. The so-called working classes have existed since the development of agriculture about 10 000 years ago, when serfs, slaves, trades people and others were forced to turn over the fruits of their labour to an exploiting class.
With the advent of the modern wage system, the exploitation was hidden, but it still existed where men, women and children were forced to work long hours in miserable conditions. My 97-year-old mother recalls the songs sang during the time of indenture and enacted in school plays.
If probed she can sing the songs in Tamil: Our arms and legs are so full of fatigue. We slash the cane in the hot sun from sunrise to sunset. They cried out for mercy to their harsh sidars (supervisors), overseeing their toil. Have you no heart, even a stone would feel our pain? Has the devil resided in your soul for you to be so heartless?
Today she observes that nothing has really changed when she sees municipal workers, mainly black people, toiling on the roads and the sons of the indentured hurling messy garbage bags into stinky trucks. I reassure her that the tables have indeed turned and that there are so-called “black diamonds” enjoying the fruits of freedom. She remains unconvinced and still worries about the underclass.
“Have they eaten,” she says. “Do they have homes to go back to?” In her profound simplicity my mother touches a pulsating nerve that connects us to the root of a society’s very being. One can judge a nation by the way in which it treats its workers.
Life in SA is a battle for the working classes. I hear the stories of the Aurora mine workers and I am deeply touched by one man’s words when he says he can hardly drink a cup of tea without thinking of what his family is eating. While the new rich gorge on sushi and carry an inordinate amount of belly fat, others can barely afford a loaf of bread.
But the plight of workers is not unique to SA. Universally there has always been the cry for workers of the world to unite against oppression and exploitation, hence the international recognition of this special day.
Karl Marx believed that work was the primary means by which human beings located themselves in society and gave meaning to their existence. Alienation, according to Marx, breaks this fundamental connection and creates disempowered people.
This concept has relevance to us today in the work situation when the pursuit of alienating paid labour results in the systematic and intentional undermining of a person’s conscious mind.
I was privy to a chilling example of this behaviour recently when I overheard an employer say to his employee. “Don’t say ‘I think’ my man. I don’t pay you to think. I pay you to do what I tell you to do.”
SA has produced an inordinate number of jobs that require people not to think and to do very little or nothing at all. What a waste of valuable human resources.
How many brains are we killing in a lifetime that could have amounted to something of an Einstein? Human power is as valuable as nuclear power.
Aren’t we in danger of producing a new generation of workers who are paid to be nothing more than mindless robots? Should we not be encouraging our citizens to seek a vocation in nation-building activities such as farming and agriculture, manufacturing, building and construction, health services, food and technology?
But the underlying factor that ultimately traps people in situations is the need for work. Alienating work is better than no work at all and to the masses of unemployed workers the search for any type of work is a daily prayer. So what do we do? We need to develop new models of work that should encourage individual fulfilment through learning and development.
We need adult literacy programmes and community outreach initiatives that would create a lust for learning among all South Africans. Perhaps we can adopt the motto: “Each One Teach One” and use every opportunity to develop our workers by teaching them to read, write and to learn some new skill. Let’s make our country a learning nation.
l Dr Devi Rajab is a psychologist, academic and author.