Ramaphosa Defends Minimum Wage: 'It's A Starting Point'

Cyril Ramaphosa told workers on Tuesday that the minimum wage was a starting point, and that the need to save jobs had to be balanced with the need for a living wage.
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President Cyril Ramaphosa has defended the new minimum wage of R20 per hour, eNCA reported. Speaking at a Workers' Day celebration in Port Elizabeth on Tuesday, Ramaphosa reportedly said the minimum wage was a "victory" that carefully balanced the need to save jobs with the need to increase wages.

"Within the next few months workers in our country are going to achieve another historic victory with the introduction of the national minimum wage for all working South Africans.

"I want you to understand this clearly. This is a victory for all workers in our country no matter what other people may say.

"This is also a victory for Cosatu, which was the first to really raise this issue. It was in the Freedom Charter and over the years it remained there. Cosatu said there's an important demand that there shall be a national minimum wage...

"We had to balance between losing millions of jobs and establishing a firm base," he reportedly said.

But Ramaphosa also acknowledged that the amount was not a living wage, and he said it was a starting point, TimesLive reported.

He reportedly said: "As we negotiated this‚ we knew that this is not a living wage. A living wage is much higher than this R20 an hour‚ but we said we need to form a foundation so that we can keep going up because the challenge we faced was that‚ if we suddenly said workers must earn R15‚000‚ a lot of workers would lose their jobs; a lot of companies close... The struggle for a living wage must continue but we must start somewhere‚" he said.

But in an interview with Talk Radio 702 on Tuesday, president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, Joseph Mathunjwa, compared the minimum wage to slave wages.

He reportedly said it was a slap in the face for workers who had called for wages of R12,500 per month years before.

"R12,500 as a minimum wage is achievable. We cannot go back and say R3,500 should be endorsed as the minimum wage in South Africa," he said.

Meanwhile, Ramaphosa called for equal pay for men and women, according to IOL.

"We still find in our country those who pay men more than women for doing exactly the same type of job. We want discrimination of salaries to come to an end so that men and women are doing the same job, must be paid equally. This is a struggle that you as trade unions must continue to wage. This is a struggle that you must get involved in," he reportedly said.

He also called for discipline and "humanity" in strikes.

"We have found that some of the workers have been preventing the other workers from doing very important work such as helping women to give birth, such as looking after newborn babies, pushing workers out of the way and saying you must not do this work because we are on strike...

"Let us have that humanity, there are certain services that are important. In the past children have died as a result of workers not executing some of our duties. We are saying let us have that basic humanity and make sure that the vulnerable in our society, those who are about to give birth must be assisted," he said.