Cosatu statement Human Rights Day 20-03-07

 

COSATU statement on Human Rights Day

On Human Rights Day 2007, the Congress of South African Trade Unions salutes all the heroes, heroines and martyrs of our liberation movement, whose dedication, courage and self-sacrifice helped us to win the human rights we enjoy today.

We remember especially those whose blood was shed in Sharpeville, on 21 March 1960. Their sacrifice played an inestimable part in our struggle to free our people from the prison of apartheid and racist dictatorship. We must never forget them.

The fruits of their struggle are one the world's most democratic constitutions, which enshrines fundamental human rights, and many progressive laws which spell out how these rights are to be implemented. Workers are protected by labour laws, which are designed to ensure basic standards of justice and fairness, equal opportunities, minimum wages and working conditions, and protection from victimisation.

While celebrating how much we have achieved, however, we must not be complacent. Rather we should use Human Rights Day to assess how much we still have to do before we can truly say that all our people actually benefit from all the rights they have won. Laws must not just look good on paper; they must translate into real improvements in the lives of the majority of our people.

One important but often-overlooked category of human rights is economic rights. Constitutional rights are little consolation if you have just been retrenched and face a life of grinding poverty. Legal rights put no food on the family's table or pay for school fees and medical bills.

For workers and the poor, human rights must include the right to enjoy well-paid, secure, safe and healthy jobs, and the right to basic services, healthcare, education, running water, electricity, public transport and welfare grants.

All these rights are taken for granted by members of the business community and the middle class, who have reaped the biggest rewards of the first democratic decade, but are still a far-away dream for millions of poor South Africans. That is why COSATU has resolved that this second decade of democracy must extend economic rights to the poor majority.

We have to fight to narrow the widening inequality in our society. The workers and poor must have the same rights as the rich minority to land ownership, banking services, credit, good schools and hospitals, safe neighbourhoods and all the other benefits which the rich enjoy daily but which for most of us are a far-off dream.

Human Rights Day this year closely follows the launch of the FAWU campaign to organise farm workers, most of whom are denied any of the rights they are entitled to under the constitution. On this day three years ago, we had just heard the shocking news of the murder of Nelson Chisale, who was denied his most basic right - to life - when he was cruelly fed to lions by his former boss.

Today nothing has changed. Farm workers are still paid poverty wages, are forced to work on holidays like today, are summarily evicted from their homes and are frequently assaulted and sometimes even raped and murdered. Far too many farm employers think they are still living in the apartheid era when black lives were cheap and they ruled their farms like despots.

Now they are also exploiting and ill-treating thousands of Zimbabwean workers who are fleeing into South Africa to escape poverty, hunger and even worse attacks on human rights at the hands of the Mugabe government. Even skilled workers have been forced to take on menial jobs on farms, in restaurants or as security guards.

COSATU insists that these and all other immigrant workers are entitled to the same human rights enshrined in our constitution as indigenous workers. They must not be discriminated against in any way.

We are resolutely opposed to any form of xenophobia, which seeks, wrongly, to blame, stigmatise and even attack foreign nationals for causing unemployment and poverty. These workers are not the cause, but fellow-victims, of a system which exploits all workers, and of employers who take advantage of vulnerable people. We must never let our class enemy to divide and rule us; workers' unity is essential in the fight to end unemployment, poverty and exploitation.

At the same time as defending the rights of Zimbabwean workers here in South Africa, we must also intensify our campaign for human rights and democracy within Zimbabwe. The brutal murder of Gift Tandare and the arrests, torture and beatings of opposition leaders have yet again exposed the barbarity and ruthlessness of this regime.

We dedicate this Human Rights Day to our farm workers and to our comrades in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions who will be risking their lives on 3-4 April in their stay-away in protest against slavery wages and in defence of their human and workers' rights.

At the same time we remember all the other workers around the world who are denied their basic rights to organise and protest - in Swaziland, Guinea, Sudan, Western Sahara, Palestine, Burma, Colombia, Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka and many other parts of the world.

The most important way to defend human rights and democracy is to build strong, independent trade unions. There is no better safeguard against dictatorship than a strong, united workers' movement. The best possible way for COSATU members to commemorate this historic day is recruit new members into their union and build up our forces so that we can wage war on anyone who seeks to deny us our basic human rights.

An injury to one is an injury to all!