Role of Civil Society in Cooperating with National Competition Authorities
INCSOC Workshop
Geneva
January 2004
2011年河南高考分数线
David Lewis
Competition Tribunal
South Africa
flavourI am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this conference. In the ven or so years that I have worked in the area of competition policy, my engagement with consumer groups has been extremely limited. I would like to be able to claim this is a conquence of my position in the Competition Tribunal which is the adjudicative wing of our competition authorities. However I would be surprid if the Commission, the procutorial and advoca
cy wing of the authority, is able to claim anything rembling an extensive interface with consumers. As I shall elaborate below, the truth is that consumers are very poorly organized in South Africa and the extent of engagement between consumer reprentatives and the competition authorities is, in conquence, extremely limited. When, some ven years ago, the Competition Bill made its way through the parliamentary process, it was accompanied by inten debate at public hearings convened by the parliamentary committee, debates that were widely reported in the media. Academics, regulators, trade unions and business associations all made submissions at the hearings but I cannot recall a single submission made on behalf of consumers. encyclopaedia
I’ve been asked to speak on the role of civil society in cooperating with national competition authorities. I am going to approach this from the perspective of the competition authorities – I am going to ask how, starting from a very low ba, we in the competition authorities may help build the kind of consumer awareness and organisation that, I believe, is necessary for ensuring the sustainability of the competition project. Ther
万国司法考试网e is an unabashedly lf-interested dimension to this concern. The introductory note prepared for this conference recognis, and I accept, that competition authorities are ultimately as strong as the backing that they receive from consumers when it reports that ‘the 7-Up project revealed a crying need for building a network of stakeholders, especially civil society, so that the competition regimes at the national level could be strengthened’. Nor, of cour, is this a charitable exerci on the part of consumer activists but is, itlf, rather recognition that consumer engagement with the work of competition authorities will underpin the strength, but also the character of the competition authorities. It will, in short, help build a competition authority conscious that its social roots lie in the consumer movement.
The South African experience is, as I have already intimated, a sobering one despite our recent history. South Africa has, as you all know, come out of a very recent history of inten and widespread political mobilisation. You are equally aware that this is an instance of political mobilisation that has a happy ending. The objective of the mobilisation was broadly realid – a thoroughly authoritarian, anti-democratic and racist
explain是什么意思state, was overthrown and replaced by a political order that has become something of a beacon for tho who value broadly-bad democracy established from the bottom up.
adventurerThere are many unsung heroes in the South African liberation story. But few are less acknowledged, less appreciated, than consumers. Forests have been destroyed in the effort to describe and analy the roles of workers, small business people, women, residential communities, guerrilla fighters and the international community in bringing down apartheid but, remarkably, I know of no book that has been written that has sought to record the role of consumers and consumer power in destroying apartheid and in building democracy in South Africa. And it is not as though the role of consumers was subtle or hidden from view. There are few anti-apartheid activists, and, more important, few ordinary South Africans who lived through the anti-apartheid struggle who did not experience, at first hand, a consumer boycott. There were the focud trade union inspired boycotts – in the ‘fifties in one of the most celebrated battles in anti-apartheid history, consumers boycotted potatoes in protest at working conditions on the farms. In later years there were boycotts of pasta and of red meat. In fact, I and veral comrades
in the union for which I worked spent veral months in prison for our role in organising a boycott of red meat in support of striking abattoir workers and, let me underline, it wasn’t the strike that unttled the authorities as much as the consumer mobilisation that underpinned the boycott. Massive rent, bus and electricity payment boycotts were the order of the day from the ‘fifties through to the ‘nineties. And although most of the actions were inevitably driven by a t of broader political objectives, the basis of mobilisation was usually the high prices and poor quality of basic commodities.
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And yet, with one significant exception – that being the mobilisation of aids sufferers against the price of anti-retroviral drugs – the demi of apartheid ems to have demobilid the very consumers who played such a central role in getting us to where we have come today. Other civil society groupings have managed to re-invent themlves in the new society – the unions retain a strong voice, women’s rights are institutionally recognid and promoted at the highest levels of the state; the youth have statutory commissions to promote their interests as do the disabled. But the consumers are largely forgotten. Consumer protection has a relatively low profile even in the responsible
department of state where the big ticket programmes of trade, industrial and technology policy enjoy a much higher priority.
The enthusiasm with which government has pursued competition policy is the apparent exception. Here is a pro-consumer policy enthusiastically endord by government both in the form of a powerful statute and fairly generous financial support for the agencies established by the statute. But although the establishment of a competition authority has, in its still short life-span, been a reasonably successful policy intervention, it has not succeeded in galvanising consumer activism, it has not become the centre-piece of consumer activism that some may have imagined. I guess that this is my first, rather banal, insight: the prence of a competition authority is no substitute for the usual ingredients of strong, mass-bad organisation and the are critically the activist leadership who are prepared to accept the low salaries, the long hours and the hostility that, in any society, characteris the work of tho who t about organising the poor and economically dinfranchid, be they workers or consumers. A strong, lf-consciously consumer oriented competition authority m
toreaday complement basic consumer organisation, but it will never, on its own, generate it. ptember缩写As in most societies, the basis for consumer activism exists in South Africa. There is articulated, consumer concern about everything from the price of steel to the price of school uniforms, from the price of motorcars to the price of basic pharmaceuticals, from bank charges to mobile phone tariffs. But, for the most part, there is not the consumer leadership able to cohere the inchoate grievances into the sort of articulate, focud expression that would force the competition authorities, among others, to put consumers at the centre of their concerns.mgj
