COSATU CEC steps up support for strike 06-06-07

 

COSATU CEC steps up support for strike

The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of South African Trade Unions has reaffirmed the federation's full support for the national strike by public service workers. COSATU will not allow a defeat of the public sector strike. The implications of such a defeat to workers as a whole will simply be devastating.

The context of the strike must be properly situated. Firstly government, with the active support of white monopoly capital, has pursued conservative fiscal and monetary policies, including inflation targeting, that we have been rejected as being inappropriate for our developmental goals.

The policy was enforced through among others, the blunt instrument of high interest rates and inflation-linked wage increases, unilaterally implemented by government. For the public service this has amounted to a wage freeze and the reduction of public servants through retrenchments and voluntary severance packages. This has exacerbated the serious shortages of staff in critical areas, resulting in poor service delivery. The combination of poor pay and bad working conditions has encouraged an exodus from the public service, especially by nurses.

COSATU believes that service delivery can only be improved by improving working conditions, better pay and investment of resources by the state. The current strike is an expression of this poor pay and the government's failure to implement some collective agreements.

Whilst this is happening the employers and the senior managers have in the meantime completely ignored the gospel of the inflation target and voted themselves an average of 38% annual increases. This has led to a situation where in some of the private sector companies the wage gap is 1:1000.

In the public service the government has removed senior public-sector managers from the scope of the PSCBC. It (government) has systematically improved their wages over time. Whereas the government addressed the apartheid wage gap between 1994 until 1999, since the introduction of this policy the gains we made to reduce the apartheid wage gap have been reversed from 1:18 in 1999 to 1:29 to date.

This has led to growing inequalities in our society. It is these growing inequalities more than anything else that has led us to conclude that the main beneficiaries of the economic transformation in the first 13 years have been white monopoly capital and not workers and the poor.

Any settlement at the current proposed 6,5% will give employers the wrong impression that this is a benchmark. Already many of our unions are involved in other bitter struggles to ward off the argument of inflation-linked increases,

For this reason the government is no longer going to face only the might of its million workers but the entire working population of our country.

The CEC has agreed on the following programme:

1.. A call for the intensification of the strike by the public sector workers already on strike. In particular we call for a total shutdown of the public service on Friday 8 June
2.. A call on the rest of the workers in all sectors of the economy to hold lunch time pickets on Friday 8 June in support of this total shut down of the public service
3.. All COSATU unions will with immediate effect consult their members, mobilise them and discuss with their lawyers to look at how they could embark on solidarity strikes in support of the workers in the public service. In this regard every union will work towards a complete strike on Wednesday 13 June.
4.. On Wednesday 6 June the CEC itself, including all COSATU's national office bearers, joined Gauteng COSATU members in a picket at the Department of Home Affairs in Johannesburg, in a show of solidarity with the strikers.
The CEC congratulates all their workers on strike for their determination, unity and militancy in defence of their fully justified demands and in the face of threats and a massive propaganda onslaught from the employer.

We note the court interdicts against workers whom the government claims to be working in essential services, compelling them to return to work.

While we will not encourage anyone to break the law, the meeting demanded that the government immediately withdraw its threats to dismiss workers who are exercising their constitutional right to strike in support of their claim for improved pay and working conditions. These threats are despite the absence of minimum service agreements which the government has refused to sign since being requested to do so by the unions in 1999.

Accordingly we are calling on the government to sign minimum service agreements with the unions immediately so that no hospital is left unmanned during the strike.

We remain completely opposed to any violence or intimidation by the state. In particular we demand that the police refrain from the kind of violent attacks on workers which have occurred at some workplaces. The unions for their part will continue to do everything possible to keep the dispute peaceful, disciplined and legal, whatever the provocation.

We once again demand that the government brings a genuinely improved offer to the bargaining council so that an honourable settlement can be reached that is acceptable to all sides and the strike can be ended.