THROUGHOUT the world, particularly in South Africa, inequality is becoming a huge concern.

“It’s hard to find a political or business leader who doesn’t say they are worried about inequality,” says Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International. “It’s even harder to find one who is doing something about it. Many are actively making things worse by slashing taxes and scrapping labour rights.”

Oxfam’s annual report – Reward Work, Not Wealth – has once again demolished the idea that the capitalist system shares out the world’s wealth in a fair way to the poor majority and the workers who create that wealth.

It reveals that 82% of all the wealth created in 2017 was distributed to the world’s richest 1% – while the world’s poorest saw no increase in their wealth at all.

“Approximately two-thirds of billionaire wealth is the product of inheritance, monopoly and cronyism,” which, says Oxfam, “allows businesses to generate obscene levels of wealth ... The entire situation is exacerbated by crafty tax dodging, as shown in the Panama Papers.”

This is the view of the SA Federation of Trade Unions and suggests that our country’s current epidemic of corruption and cronyism, while extreme, is not exceptional.

Rising rewards for shareholders and bosses come at the expense of workers’ pay and conditions, including the erosion of workers’ rights, the excessive influence of big business over government policymaking and the relentless corporate drive to minimise costs and maximise returns to shareholders.

The report also confirms that wealth remains concentrated mostly among men.

Across the world, women consistently earn less than men and are usually in the lowest paid and least secure forms of work.

By illustration, 90% of billionaires are men.

South Africa is an extreme example. The top 10% receive half of all earned income, while the bottom 50% of the workforce receive just 12%.

A University of the Witwatersrand research report showed that in 2016:

Steinhoff’s now discredited former chief executive Markus Jooste earned R88.9m, 234 times more than an average worker.

Shoprite’s former chief executive, Whitey Basson, earned R100.1m 1 332 times more than the average salary of an employee.

Yet seven Cape Town Shoprite workers faced charges of theft after being caught on video accepting tips from satisfied customers, as a way of supplementing their meagre incomes.

The government’s response to the crisis of poverty is the National Minimum Wage Bill, which will condemn millions of workers to continue living in poverty, on R20 an hour, or R3 500 a month. Even its main advocate, Cyril Ramaphosa, concedes that this is not a living wage, but a starting point.

And not all workers will be entitled to even that pitiful amount; with the minimum wage for workers on an expanded public works programme, it will be R11 per hour.

Far worse is the poverty suffered by the 16 million who are unemployed. South Africa’s unemployment at the more realistic level of 36.8% is one of the highest in the world. These millions have no source of income except hand-outs from employed family members or titbits from insecure piece jobs.

Meanwhile, the political leaders, whose neoliberal pro-business policies are responsible for the crisis of poverty and inequality, have recently awarded themselves 4% salary increments, backdated to April 2017, for the highest-paid state officials.

President Jacob Zuma’s salary rose to just under R3m, 71 times more than the minimum on which the government claims people can survive.

The only way out of the crisis of inequality has to be through a mass movement of the working class based on a programme guided by the principles of Marxism-Leninism for the nationalisation of the mineral and manufacturing monopolies, the banks, and the land, in line with the aspiration expressed in the Freedom Charter!

* Chavalala is president of the SA Federation of Trade Unions