Are you puzzled -- even hopelessly confused -- about the contradictions between the words and actions of the government in the long-running public service dispute? About the fact that the government has firmly reiterated its commitment to collective bargaining while equally firmly maintaining its right to ignore the process with the imposition of a wage settlement?
If so, I am about to add to that confusion. For a similar contradiction is about to emerge into the public arena concerning prisons. More accurately, the privatisation of prisons.
Although Pieter Jordaan, the correctional services department asset procurement director, insisted that privatisation was not an issue. The two prisons -- in Bloemfontein and Louis Trichardt -- which are to be built and operated by private consortia are, he said, examples of pubic private partnerships.
Did this mean that correctional services warders, many of them members of the Cosatu-affiliated police and prisons union, Popcru, would be employed at these prisons? -- 'No. These companies will provide their own staff.'
But Jordaan was adamant that there was no problem with the unions on this score. 'We have already passed all that,' he said.
Not according to Popcru. 'Any moves to privatise prisons will be resisted by Popcru,' said the union's publicity officer Siyavuya Jafta. Cosatu and the other member of the governing alliance, the Communist Party, also maintained that the operation of prisons should be 'a function of the state and the pubic sector'.
However, the moves are fully underway. The correctional services department will not put a timeframe on it, but one official noted that the prisons would be completed 'sooner rather than later'. Because the companies would have no income until the prisons were built 'we can expect construction to be speeded up'.
The two institutions were put out to tender in 1997 by the department of public works and were initially scheduled to house 1 500 inmates in each. Since then, the occupancy provision has been doubled: Louis Trichardt is earmarked to house 3 032 inmates and Bloemfontein 2 924.
Two consortia are involved in the projects, Ikhwezi and SA Custodial Services (SACS). Ikhwezi includes Murray and Roberts construction, British/Norwegian company, Group 4 Securicor, and Investec Bank. SACS is headed by the controversial Wackenhut Corporation of the United States and includes local partners Group 5 construction, Concor and security company Fidelity Guards.
'It looks as if we are heading in the same direction as the United States, where privatising prisons has had terrible human consequences,' said Dr Judith van Heerden of the University of Cape Town medical school. Van Heerden, a primary health care specialist who campaigned against prison conditions under apartheid, is mainly concerned about the conditions in which prisoners are held. 'But privatised prisons are also big business,' she noted, 'and that creates many other problems.'
It is this big business aspect which specifically concerns the trade union movement, well beyond Popcru. 'Using inmate labour is booming throughout this country,' said Professor Randall Shelden, a criminologist at the University of Nevada in the US.
Prison factories, paying inmates as little as 23 cents an hour, were producing items such as blue jeans and the high fashion lingerie line, Victoria's Secret. Inmates were also being employed for salaries of $20 (R125) to $40 (R250) a month to handle computer data inputting and to manufacture anything from furniture to electronic components.
In the 1997 financial year, in the state of California alone, convict labour produced goods and services valued at more than $155 million. The situation was summed up by US writer and film producer, Eve Goldberg:
'An American worker who was once paid $8 an hour, loses his job when the company relocates to Thailand, where workers are paid $2 a day. Unemployed, alienated from a society indifferent to his needs, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents an hour.'
According the Shelden, another of the adverse effects of privatisation has been the tendency of private operators to cut costs, especially of labour. 'This has had predictable results in terms of poor treatment of inmates, escapes, and so on,' he said.
'Exactly,' said Jafta. 'We know that all over the world privatisation goes hand in hand with job losses and leads to the exploitation of workers by bosses who are interested in making huge profits. We need to say once again: enough is enough.'