SA labour negotiations: a zero-sum game in which everyone loses
For many, workers’ unions still offer the only mechanism by which they can wield some form of power in the workplace
Donald Trump has famously and repeatedly hailed himself as the consummate negotiator and deal maker, boasting about his hard-nosed prowess at always securing the best deals. That zero-sum or “fixed pie” mantra — that any loss for you is a gain for me, and that we’re bartering for a finite amount of value — may have made him a supposedly wealthy man (even if he had to resort to nearly 2,000 legal cases to enforce many of his deals), but we have also seen in recent times that when he doesn’t call all the shots, his so-called no-nonsense approach to negotiating is woefully inadequate. Whether in dealing with political opponents in his Congress, with other global leaders, or even judges who have time and again overruled his administration’s policies (63 times, according to one count), he has proven himself unable to browbeat or bully his way into what he would consider a winning deal. In SA we’re blessed to have experienced another path. We’ve witnessed the transformative power of authe...
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