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Decision of the Cosatu CEC04 - 05 - 06 |
The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, with leaders from the federation's 21 affiliates, held a special meeting on 3 May 2006 to discuss three key issues:
- The programme of action for the Jobs and Poverty Campaign, which includes demonstrations and sectoral strikes and will culminate in a national stayaway on May 18.
- Mobilisation against proposals at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that could doom efforts to ensure sustainable and equitable economic growth in developing countries.
- Ways to ensure success for the security guards' strike in the face of vicious employer tactics and biased media coverage.
Decisions on the Jobs and Poverty Campaign
COSATU is now mobilising our members, the working class and the broader community in a campaign of action that will focus attention on the national catastrophe of unemployment and poverty. Key demands are:1. The creation of decent, well-paid and secure jobs on a mass scale. Employers must stop casualising and outsourcing jobs in their endless effort to cut pay and conditions. Retailers must develop local production rather than looking to imports. The government must do more to drive a development strategy that creates decent work on a mass scale.
2. It must act urgently against the speculative capital inflows that are driving up the rand and devastating our export industries, at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs. We reiterate our call for 'speed bumps' - special taxes to deter companies from moving money in and out of the country - in order to arrest the runaway value of the rand. We strongly oppose any rise in interest rates, which will have a negative impact on job creation and retention.
3. The government must fulfil its promises to provide public works on a massive scale, so that unemployed people have a chance to contribute to their communities and earn a living.
4. Our young people and workers must have equal access to education and skills. Even now, 12 years after we won democracy, Africans make up only about half of university students. Too many of our children must try to learn without textbooks or decent buildings. Moreover, every community, not just the leafy suburbs, must get decent government services like education, health and policing. These services must be provided affordably, without cut offs or evictions for those who cannot pay.
5. We must mobilise to stop the E.U. and the U.S. from pushing through tariff reductions and privatisation of services through negotiations at the WTO.
6. Employers must end racist and gender abuse in the workplace, as well as discrimination against people infected and affected by HIV. In the recent COSATU survey, one in seven black workers said they experienced racial abuse on the job.
The Special CEC planned the following actions to support our demands.
1. Lunch-hour demonstrations organised on Tuesday, 9 May, by the manufacturing unions; on Thursday, 11 May, by the public sector unions; and on Tuesday, 16 May, by the mining, construction and private services unions. These demonstrations will be used to highlight issues around the WTO.
2. On 11 May we will organise demonstrations outside the U.S. and E.U. embassies and consulates in Pretoria, Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, together with the rest of progressive civil society.
3. On 18 May COSATU will hold a general strike to support our demands in the Jobs and Poverty Campaign. Workers will march to employers, government departments, and the embassies of the U.S. and E.U. countries.
4. After the national strike until COSATU's National Congress on 18 September, our locals will hold demonstrations against companies that abuse workers.
The COSATU CEC scheduled for 22 May 2006 and the COSATU National Congress in September will evaluate the campaign and decide the way forward
Economic growth in recent years has benefited mostly the rich, leaving workers to face high unemployment and low pay. In the past four years, the economy has generated only just over half the number of decent jobs needed to reach the ASGI-SA goal of halving unemployment by 2014. Each year, 350 000 jobs earning over R1000 a month were created. But 600 000 jobs a year were needed to reach government's target.
Public servants suffer poor working conditions, often with very heavy workloads and responsibilities. In the parastatals, privatisation of 'non-core' businesses continues to eat away at service delivery, employment conditions and public assets.
The Jobs and Poverty Campaign will also support our members in specific disputes with their bosses. These disputes include:
1. Restructuring at Transnet, with privatisation and outsourcing affecting workers and the parastatal's ability to meet developmental objectives.
2. Our dispute over the establishment of REDS in electricity, which has proceeded in ways that will undermine electrification, make the industry more inefficient and inequitable, and impose job losses.
3. Disputes between local government and SAMWU, which centre on the union's organisational rights and privatisation.
4. The dispute between Woolworths and SACCAWU over wages and working conditions
5. Our demands, spearheaded by FAWU, that farm workers be freed of abusive employment conditions, poor pay and job insecurity.
6. Disputes between the auto and motor industry and NUMSA disputes, including the threatened retrenchments at Ford.
WTO agreements on NAMA and Services
The CEC reviewed developments in negotiations at the WTO arising out of the anti-developmental conclusion of the Hong Kong round in 2005. It agreed that workers in South Africa and across the global South now face a new and deadly threat to decent work and development.
It has become clear that a number of governments, particularly from the European Union and the United States, are paying only lip service to the commitment to a developmental round. They want to impose a terrible trade-off on developing countries: slightly increased access to the markets of developed countries for agricultural products in return for significant market liberalisation, particularly in industrial products.
This would mean a country like South Africa faces de-industrialisation, losing a significant part of our manufacturing sector and becoming simply a producer of primary products and a destination for tourists. The proposed tariff cuts will bit deeply into our labour-intensive sectors, destroying thousands of jobs. And many other developing countries will face the same fate.
A second threat to workers' wellbeing has arisen in the negotiations over trade in services under GATS. The Hong Kong Ministerial agreed that GATS negotiations would no longer be conducted individually between countries, but in plurilateral negotiations on sectors.
The new approach places tremendous pressure on countries that do not want to open up their services, especially public services, to foreign investors. A major risk is that if a country permits foreign investment in basic services, there will be limits placed on the extent to which the state can subsidise provision of poor communities.
In addition to supporting its demands on the WTO through the Jobs and Poverty Campaign, COSATU has held a meeting with civil society in South Africa to mobilise against the current proposals at the WTO.
Solidarity with the private security workers' strike
The CEC expressed its 100% support for the strike by security guards. These workers are underpaid and ruthlessly exploited. More than half earn under R1500 a month, most have no benefits and many only impermanent jobs, while they face danger every day. The industry is one of the most conservative, exploitative and backward, right after farm and domestic work.The CEC noted that the employers are still refusing to negotiate, despite pleas from the union, the CCMA and the Department of Labour. It is clear that they are trying to break SATAWU. Yet SATAWU is by far the largest union in the industry, with 35 000 members. In contrast, the 14 unions that signed the agreement have only 25 000 members - a clear minority.
We learnt with appreciation that the CCMA is convening such a meeting on the 5 May 2006. COSATU will attend the meeting together with its affiliates in order to ensure that a resolution is found. We call on the employers to attend and to ensure that the dispute is settled in a manner that improves the workers' conditions.
It is obvious that the employers in the industry are trying to wreck the workers' organisation rather than to solve the many problems the industry faces. Their actions go against the spirit of the new labour laws, which support organisation by workers and seek constructive settlements to overcome the apartheid legacy in the workplace.
We appreciate the demand by the Minister of Labour that the employers return to negotiations, and his finding that he cannot extend an agreement that has been rejected by the majority union. Following discussions with COSATU, he has realised that it is the employers, not SATAWU, who refuse to negotiate.
The CEC condemned the incidents of violence which have been associated with the strike, although we recognise that many were not committed by strikers. COSATU has always insisted that all its actions be disciplined, peaceful and lawful. We unreservedly condemn the disruption and assault of other workers in Cape Town's Good Hope centre during May Day.
In some cases, union members were provoked by untransformed elements within the police. At the same time, we recognise that most of the police are members of COSATU themselves and do not want a conflict with strikers. We call for the isolation of those reactionary elements in the police that still want to treat striking members and demonstrations the way they did before 1994. In contrast, many members of SAPS, particularly union members, go out of their way to avoid unnecessary confrontation and to bridge the gap with union members.
Still, it is important to lay the blame where it ultimately belongs. Vicious and intransigent employer tactics have led to anger and frustration amongst security guards, undermining their discipline in some cases.
Only solidarity from the labour movement and the community will break the logjam and force the employers back to the negotiations table. Therefore:
1. COSATU will immediately establish strike committees to coordinate solidarity actions at all levels of our organisation.
2. Our affiliates will organise pickets, demonstrations and marches, starting immediately, against employer associations and companies.
3. The security companies say that their customers will not meet the cost of decent salaries for the guards who risk their lives to ensure their safety. We call on customers to demand instead that the security companies negotiate in good faith and seek to upgrade conditions in the industry.
4. Every union will communicate directly with the security companies to demand that they improve conditions for their workers, starting by negotiating with SATAWU.
5. We will start a mass campaign to call and write the companies to get them back to the negotiations table.
Finally, the CEC expressed its solidarity with the family of Merriam Reed, a worker tragically killed when she fell off a moving bus as the workers were returning from a May Day rally in De Aar. Comrade Merriam Reed came from Britstown.