COSATU CEC Statement 07-06-07

 

COSATU CEC statement, 7 June 2007

The Congress of South African Trade Unions held a scheduled meeting of its Central Executive Committee, comprising the national office bearers and representatives of all its 21 affiliates, from 4-6 June 2007.

Public service strike
The CEC 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.

Among the other important issues discussed were:

Fidentia
In line with the decision to ensure we get to the bottom of the Fidentia fiasco and to ensure that such a scandal never ever repeats itself, we invited the Minister of Finance, comrade Trevor Manuel, to address the CEC on the lessons we can all draw on this matter. He gave a presentation on the current state of the retirement funds industry and the scandal involving the Fidentia company. His presentation is presented separately.

We have broadly endorsed the lessons and proposed way forward outlined by the Minister. We will continue to work with the Treasury to ensure that the beneficiaries do not lose out as a result of this fiasco. We will work with the Minister to ensure we improve the political accountability of the worker trustees so that boundaries between accountability to the members and their fiduciary responsibilities are spelt out more clearly. We shall deepen the work already underway and train the worker trustees. In this regard the forthcoming NEDLAC annual summit which will focus on SETA must find a role for SETA to deepen this work.

The CEC reaffirmed COSATU's demand for all those responsible for the misappropriation of funds to be prosecuted and punished and for monies stolen from the mineworkers' widows and orphans and other beneficiaries to be recovered as speedily as possible, but expressed serious concern at the suggestion that this might take until 2010.

We also had an initial discussion on the Minister's proposals for a comprehensive social security system. While not opposed to the principle of a universal compulsory retirement fund, as well as ensuring that workers keep these funds and only use them for their intended reason which is retirement, we are concerned that because of the reality of the working poor associated with low wages and casualisation, it is a challenge to motivate workers not to use their retirement funds when they lose their jobs. It is not conceivable to have a worker knowing that she/he has a R100 000 in the fund, but have nothing to live on in the interim.

The debate about a comprehensive social security must include restructuring of the UIF and the need for the introduction of the Basic Income Grant. Currently workers who resign do not access UIF benefits. Other questions to be looked into were what percentage of the funds will be deducted for administration and who will administer the scheme? COSATU will hold a major workshop before September 2007 to engage with all these questions and to develop a more comprehensive response to the proposals.

2010 World Cup
The meeting was addressed by the CEO of the 2010 Soccer World Cup Local Organising Committee, comrade Danny Jordan. Among the many points he raised were that:

a.. Hosting such major events and bringing people to South Africa was a way of establishing the country's identity internationally.
b.. All cities were invited to submit programmes which would bring long-term sustainable benefits for the area.
c.. Investment must not be taken from education, health, etc. to pay for the stadiums.
He stressed that no human being on earth can take away this World Cup from South Africa. The only circumstances that could cause this are a civil war or natural disaster. It was a myth that it will be financial disaster. It has already generated more revenue than Germany. It will be first to be delivered on cell phones.

The new stadiums will be the first, except for the FNB, to be built specifically for football. Fan parks, crucial for millions of fans throughout Africa who will not get to stadiums, are to be provided. The transport plan for non-hosting cities and towns will require doubling the country's fleet of buses.

COSATU has full confidence in our people, led by the Local Organising Committee and the government, that the 2010 soccer world cup will be the best ever organised in the more than 100 years of FIFA's history.

The CEC expressed disappointment at the continued negativity in some quarters about the capacity of the South Africans to deliver a world-class event as it has done so on so many countless occasions. We shall do the best we can to ensure that we contribute towards ensuring that the first African-hosted Soccer World Cup is a tremendous success.

Jobs and Poverty Campaign

The Ninth National Congress decided "to make the Jobs and Poverty Campaign the centrepiece of our programme in the coming period".

Consistent with the CEC decision to ensure a bottom-up approach to the formulation of our demands, a questionnaire has been circulated to members and structures asking them to prioritise their demands and how they should be backed.

Provincial broad front summit on jobs and poverty have been held in the month of March and April. A national broad front summit has now been arranged for 18-19 June 2007. We shall in the course of the next week give the media more details on this important summit.

SANDU case

The CEC were presented with the Constitutional Court judgement on the case between SA National Defence Union and the Ministry of Defence, which upheld the ban on the trade unions in the SANDF affiliating to a politically aligned trade union federation. The federation is to seek a meeting with the Minister of Defence to discuss the way forward. Meanwhile leaders of the SA Security Forces Union (SASFU) who have applied to COSATU for affiliation were welcomed to the meeting.

The acrimonious public debate between ANC President and COSATU General Secretary
The CEC gave its full support to the COSATU General Secretary's comments in a speech at the NUMSA 20th anniversary rally in Port Elizabeth, and rejected with contempt the personalised attack against him by President Thabo Mbeki.

The General Secretary was speaking about COSATU's conviction that the main beneficiaries of economic growth have been white monopoly capital instead of workers and the poor.

He added that the relentless propaganda in the media to present a picture in which all South Africans were getting richer, suggests that the media and some government leaders are living on a different planet. The General Secretary in speech likened the strategy of keep on repeating an untruth to the strategy used by Adolf Hitler's Minister who believed that repeating a lie often enough eventually become accepted as the truth in people's minds.

Never did the General Secretary use any words such as Nazi Germany nor did he liken the ANC and the Government to Nazi Germany. The SABC used a SAPA report of the rally which wrongly reported that the General Secretary had said that ANC government propaganda was based on the Nazi model and the SABC report was printed in the Sowetan. A COSATU statement of clarification was issued the same day.

Then in his Letter from the President in ANC Today Mbeki launched a blistering personal attack on the General Secretary, which ignored the clarification, questioned the General Secretary's integrity and accused him of being a counter-revolutionary.

The CEC endorsed COSATU's response which rejected this personalised style of engaging and recalled a recent bilateral with the ANC which discussed comments by COSATU that 'if' allegations about ANC beneficiaries of the Gautrain project were true, the individuals should be condemned. The bilateral agreed that if any more such allegations are reported in the media, Alliance partners should phone the individuals under attack to check the veracity of the report

No such call was made in this case. The President jumped to conclusions and attacked an individual. This was contrary to his own stated view that if you question people's bona fides and label them, you are not debating issues.

Yet that is precisely what he did. He insulted COSATU by unpacking the horrors of Nazism, as if we were not aware of these, and by the outrageous suggestion that its General Secretary was in some way equating the government of the ANC and the Nazis, which is totally and manifestly untrue.

The CEC insisted that it would continue to insist that workers and poor have benefited less that capital, as workers know from experience that General Secretary was right about propaganda. In future COSATU affiliates will respond when the President or anyone else attacks any of the COSATU leaders.

Special Browse 'Mole' Consolidated Report

The CEC debated the matter and considered the response to COSATU by the National Director of Public Prosecutions.

The CEC endorsed the NOBs' decision to ask lawyers to write to the National Director of Public Prosecutions, the SAPS, and NIA to demand to know if they were responsible for writing and distributing this document. It was noted that NIA denied any knowledge of the document. The National Director of Public Prosecutions responded however to our lawyers and stated that "I wish to thank you for bringing this matter to my attention, but advise, however, that I am not in a position to assist your client"

The CEC expressed anger at the level of arrogance of the National Director of Public Prosecutions but we were not surprised at all by the stance he has taken.

COSATU has long-since come to the conclusion that the NPA is being used to settle political battles within our movement. We have no doubt that Jacob Zuma is one of the targeted individuals who will be prosecuted to satisfy the political agenda of some people who operate clandestinely.

The Special Browse Mole Consolidated Report is reminiscent of the manner in which the NPA has positioned itself in South Africa. It is precisely for this reason that COSATU has called for its integration to the South African Police Services to make it more accountable.

We demand that the government investigate the origins of the document. We believe that our suspicions that the document is the product of elements within the NPA hell-bent on destroying Jacob Zuma and causing pain to the ANC and our movement as a whole.

The meeting dismissed with contempt the absurd suggestion by the editor of the City Press that COSATU had sent the document to itself as part of a plot to promote Jacob Zuma's status as a 'victim'. The article was a clear attempt to discredit the ANC Deputy President.