Trade-offs are required from government, business and labour if South Africa is to navigate its current “inhospitable” economic environment, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa told the social partners at the twentieth annual summit of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) in Pretoria on Friday.

He said all sectors of society were experiencing the headwinds in various ways, from declining government revenue and the threat of retrenchment in various sectors, to a fall in business profitability and sustainability.

But South Africans were not helpless “before the icy blast”, as there were platforms, such as Nedlac and sectoral structures, such as those that have emerged recently in mining and the steel industries, to enable the social partners to take collective action.

“We are not helpless and we cannot be passive . . . but we must act together to stabilise our economy, to sustain investment, to save jobs, to promote growth and to create better livelihoods,” Ramaphosa said.

The various platforms created a “golden opportunity” to debate and pursue innovative solutions and to negotiate the necessary trade-offs, guided by a common understanding that priority had to be given to saving and creating jobs.

“There needs to be trade-offs. You cannot believe that you can continue creating jobs without giving and taking,” he said, adding that some of the trade-offs, on which no specifics were offered, might need to persist for some time.

He urged the social partners to debate government’s nine-point plan, which government had unveiled as part of its strategy for dealing with the country’s weak growth and employment performance, as well as to address poor investor confidence.

“After this summit, we should perhaps convene another meeting to dissect the nine-point plan, where each of the social partners can share their views and where we can discuss new and innovative solutions to our challenges,” the Deputy President said, adding that, in Nedlac, a platform existed for “deliberation, dialogue, negotiation and action”.

Organised business indicated that it was deeply concerned about the current levels of economic growth, which were insufficient.

But business representative Jabu Mabuza also appealed for the creation of a new alliance between government, business and labour that abandoned the notion of business as “monopoly capital”.

In fact, he lambasted the current characterisation of government and labour as “comrades” and business as the “enemy”.

“We need to redefine the enemy,” Mabuza argued, with the “three enemies” being unemployment, poverty and inequality rather than big business.

Labour representative Bheki Ntshalintshali, of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, quipped that, while he had abandoned an initial speech laced with anti-business rhetoric, he was nevertheless concerned by business’ silence on the legal bid by the Free Market Foundation to prevent the Labour Minister from extending collective agreements concluded in bargaining councils to nonparties. He said labour was ready to take its fight against the action to the streets.

Ntshalintshali said it was also lamentable that the social partners were currently focused primarily on stemming job losses, rather than the creation of jobs, describing the fact that there were nearly eight-million citizens unemployed as a “crisis” that was also “not politically sustainable”.

Ramaphosa called on the social partners to deliver practical proposals on how to improve conditions in the economy. “[The proposals] must say to our respective constituencies that we need to do extraordinary things in times of extraordinary challenges to seize extraordinary opportunities.”