Browsing by Author "Nattrass, N"
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- ItemRestrictedJob Destruction in Newcastle: Minimum Wage Setting and Low-Wage Employment in the South African Clothing Industry(Project MUSE, 2014) Nattrass, N; Seekings, JFrom its establishment in 2002, the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry (NBC) was used by the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) and mostly Cape Town-based employers to raise wages in lower-wage areas, including Newcastle. Rising minimum wages were agreed in the NBC, and then extended countrywide by the Minister of Labour. In Newcastle (and elsewhere), major firms shut down, whilst others failed to comply fully with the repeatedly raised minimum wages and levies imposed by the NBC. In 2010, the NBC launched a new ‘compliance drive’, using the labour courts to put pressure on, and close down, non-compliant firms, threatening at least 20,000 jobs. The NBC also agreed further wage increases, and presented these to the Minister of Labour for extension countrywide. Newcastle employers responded by taking legal action against the Minister of Labour and the NBC. The struggle over minimum wages in areas like Newcastle is of broader importance because the non-compliant firms comprised the labour-intensive rump of the last remaining labour-intensive manufacturing sector in South Africa. The Newcastle crisis reveals starkly the tensions between labour market policies and institutions and employment. The Newcastle case shows how, under the guise of promoting ‘decent work’ for workers and the supposed levelling of the playing field for producers, an unholy coalition of a trade union, some employers and the state initiated and drove a process of structural adjustment that undermined labour-intensive employment and exported South African jobs to lower-wage countries such as Lesotho and China.
- ItemRestrictedMeeting the Challenge of Unemployment?(SAGE Publications, 2014) Nattrass, NSouth Africa has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world. Job creation is a national priority, yet labor-intensive options are derided by the trade union movement as an unacceptable throwback to the “cheap labor” policies of apartheid, and effectively ruled out by the government in its recent National Development Plan (NDP). Instead, minimum-wage setting in South Africa continues to contribute to job destruction (as evidenced most recently in the clothing industry). Policy-makers hope that support for high-productivity firms and rapid economic growth will make up for job losses and solve the unemployment problem. Unfortunately, South Africa’s economic performance has been comparatively disappointing and constrained by negative investor sentiment, especially with regard to the labor market. The NDP has called for a social accord between labor and capital. But the prospects are not promising, and unemployment is likely to remain a significant feature of the South African economic landscape.
- ItemRestrictedMillennium Development Goal 6: AIDS and the International Health Agenda(Taylor and Francis, 2014) Nattrass, NMillennium Development Goal (MDG) 6, ‘to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases’, is unique among the MDGs because it emerged in the context of unprecedented prior international mobilization, especially around HIV/AIDS, thus both reflecting and facilitating an expanding international health agenda. MDG 6 built on the idea of “health as development”, originally articulated at the 1978 conference on primary health at Alma-Ata, but was profoundly shaped by the political traction and fund-raising successes of AIDS activism and the international AIDS response. This underpinned the expansion of MDG 6 targets to include antiretroviral treatment, helped forge partnerships to reduce the prices of antiretroviral treatment and essential medicine, thereby contributing to MDG 8 (“building partnerships for development”) and, in high HIV-prevalence regions, also to MDGs 4 and 5 (maternal and child health). The UN High-Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda recommends setting country-level health targets to achieve healthcare for all. Targets can help citizens hold governments to account by providing a focus for mobilization and a yardstick to measure progress. The data collection and policy monitoring pioneered by UNAIDS, and the involvement and support for civil society organizations achieved through the AIDS response, must be continued for this broader health agenda to succeed.
- ItemOpen AccessParental presence within households and the impact of antiretroviral therapy in Khayelitsha,Cape Town(AOSIS publishing, 2013) Jury, C; Nattrass, NBackground. While household support is an important component of effective care and treatment in HIV/AIDS, there are few insights from Southern Africa into how household support arrangements change over time for patients starting antiretroviral therapy (ART). Objective. We hypothesised that patients initiating ART are more likely to be living with family, especially their mothers, compared with the general population, but that over time these differences disappear. Methods. A panel survey of ART patients was matched by age, gender and education to a comparison sample drawn from adults in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Results. The results show that there is a substantial potential burden of care on the families of patients starting ART, particularly mothers, and that the use of ART appears to reduce this burden over time. But, even after their health is restored, ART patients are significantly less likely to have a resident sexual partner and more likely to be living in single-person households than their counterparts in the general population.
- ItemRestrictedSpecial Report on the State of HIV/AIDS in South Africa(2012) Navario, P; Bekker, L; Blecher, M; Darkoh, E; Hecht, R; McIntyre, J; Nattrass, N; Ramjee, G; Rees, H; Venter, F; Whiteside, A; Wolvaardt, G; Wood, RIt is axiomatic that the global fight against HIV/AIDS cannot be won without a decisive victory in South Africa, home to 20 percent of all people living with HIV/AIDS. So how is South Africa doing? And what is the likelihood it will meet the demand for essential prevention and treatment interventions by 2015? On Jan. 21 in Cape Town, Council on Foreign Relations Global Health Fellow Dr. Peter Navario convened a meeting of South Africa's foremost HIV/AIDS thinkers, policy-makers and practitioners to discuss the state of prevention and treatment at the epicenter of the pandemic. In this article, the experts weigh in on program gaps, the major challenges to achieving universal coverage of essential prevention and treatment interventions, and what it will take to surmount these challenges.