NEHAWU's approach to transforming itself is no less radical than its vision for transforming the country.
This is evident in two key NEHAWU documents - the union's Strategic Policy Framework and its Five Year Organisational Plan - which will be debated for adoption at the union's 5th national congress from 24-27 April this year.
The congress theme is "Taking a lead in building a better life for all" and NEHAWU is repositioning itself to do just that, says assistant general secretary Fikile Majola.
The Strategic Policy Framework sets out the union's broad political and socio-economic outlook, while the Organisational Plan, details a radical internal transformation for the union.
Discussion on the two documents topped the agenda at NEHAWU's central executive committee meeting in mid-December last year. The union's top leadership from national, provincial and branch structures attended the CEC.
Majola says the national congress will distinguish between the strategic policy framework, which provides a political and ideological framework, and resolutions, which will deal with implementation and concrete steps that need to taken according to specific conditions at the time.
In the past, NEHAWU's CEC was empowered to take decisions on the union's policy framework. However, the CEC has proposed that, in future, only the national congress will have these powers. In between national congresses, the CEC will be able to vote on specific resolutions within this framework.
The policy framework deals with political theory, including theory of the South African revolution and socialism; and socio-economic strategy including the public sector, the state, transforming the economy and society.
The framework has come a long way. It was first adopted at the union's policy conference in June last year and distributed throughout the union and at COSATU congress. The document is now being redrafted on the basis of discussions in commissions at the December 1997 CEC. It will be widely distributed within the union in preparation for the congress. Summaries will also be used for shop steward training and distribution to NEHAWU members.
The process around the document has been an educative process for workers and officials at all levels of the union, says NEHAWU education secretary David Makhura. There were no sacred cows and issues have been vigorously debated.
One of the CEC discussions was over the classical Marxist approach that capitalist society is divided into two classes - the working class (proletariat) and the ruling class (bourgeoisie). "Whilst this is broadly still the case," says the discussion document, "this two-class theory does not adequately explain the process of class formation and the fact that there is a middle strata that becomes a very important area of ideological contestation between the two main contending class forces."
In line with COSATU's 1997 congress resolutions, the policy framework reaffirms the union's commitment to socialism. It says the SACP slogan, "Socialism is the Future, Build it Now", should be turned into a living reality.
Transformation, according to the document, means building socialism. And a key aspect of this transformation is transforming the state into a national democratic state that has a developmental role in society. Other key aspects include:
As a public sector union, NEHAWU is well-positioned to begin to build socialism now.
"the size of the public sector in South Africa, particularly the high level of capital assets in the public sector means that although our economy is capitalist, there is a base for building socialism in the public sector," says the policy document.
However, it warns that the domination of the world economy by banking and financial interests means that the government is under pressure to reduce the role of the public sector. "These pressures must be resisted. It will be difficult and will involve struggle and sacrifice, but that will be nothing new."
The five-year organisational plan will be critical in repositioning the union. The union says the plan is intended to provide a programmatic framework within which the union will carry out day-to-day activities to achieve its strategic objectives.
According to a draft presented to the NEHAWU CEC, the organisational plan gives overall operational direction and purpose to the daily activities of the leadership, membership and staff of the union.
"It is not a fixed and dogmatic plan that prescribes activities that can only be changed after five years. It is a flexible guide to action.
"It must be reviewed and constantly evaluated so as to test its relevance in a rapidly changing global and national political environment. It cannot and must not be cast in stone."
NEHAWU's organisational renewal has a long history. The first step was taken at the union's "rebirth congress" in March 1992. The 1995 national congress consolidated this initial restructuring.
Massive and rapid membership growth presented NEHAWU with daunting challenges. A new political terrain following the 1994 democratic elections also necessitated a shift. The union's internal capacity and ability to respond to external challenges had to be dramatically beefed up, says Majola.
"the challenge was no longer to simply resist but to come up with concrete proposals to transform the public sector," he said.
NEHAWU's December 1995 CEC adopted a policy document, "Realigning to meet new challenges". This was a turning point in the life of the union, and the resulting realignment process was described as a "surgical overhaul".
Implementation began in earnest in 1996. The union's new sectors were launched: tertiary education, private health, social welfare, public health and state administration.
The union's June 1997 policy conference adopted strategic plans for departments and sectors but identified the need for a five year organisational plan that would take the union into the 21st century.
"This plan will introduce a new style of work, a new management system, strategic planning, efficiency and professionalism," says Majola. "It leaves no room for 'ad-hocism' and 'last minutes'."
Majola says the union's thinking has been heavily influenced by the COSATU September Commission, particularly the chapter on organisation Ð Building COSATU's engines. What type of organisation do we need to implement our vision? was the question the union had to confront.
The goal of the plan is to consolidate the union's realignment process. Its overall thrust is a critical search for improved ways of running the union so as to qualitatively advance the interests of the working class and the poor.
"Through this plan, we hope that the union can effectively and efficiently contribute to building a better life for all, a goal that is only achievable and sustainable if the country moves in a socialist direction," says the document.
"The need to build socialism now remains the tactical and strategic focus of our daily struggles for workplace democratisation and broader social transformation."
When NEHAWU was launched in 1987, the main challenge was to destroy apartheid. "Today the main challenge is to put South Africa on a socialist path," the document says.
"It is this context of a new round of working class struggles in the 21st century that we locate our organisational plan. This plan gives us the confidence to confront global neo-liberal capitalism with its marauding gangs of free market disciples who will stop at nothing in turning the world into a 'dog-eat-dog' and 'survival of the fittest' environment."
The plan's objectives include:
The plan details proposals for the union's constitutional structures, departments, sectors and provinces.
Majola says NEHAWU has already aligned its provincial structures in line with the country's political demarcation.
"Provincial governments are important centres of power in social transformation," he says. "They take decisions on provincial budgets, service delivery and as public sector employers."
NEHAWU is therefore determined to build capacity in its own provincial structures to effectively engage with provincial governments in the development process.
The union's 1998 education programme will focus on its provinces and more of the union's resources will go to the provincial level.
But how does NEHAWU's five-year plan relate to the September 1997 COSATU congress mandate to form one public sector union?
Majola says the union, at leadership and membership level, has an unwavering commitment to the merger process. And NEHAWU sees its plan as unfolding in the context of building one public sector union in COSATU.
However, it would be a mistake to run down NEHAWU's capacity in the build-up to the merger process. The union's plans should be seen as laying the basis for building an even stronger public sector union in the future.
NEHAWU has already held joint meetings with SADTU and POPCRU this year, and agreed that COSATU's public sector coordinating committee should be revived.
Also on the agenda are joint actions by COSATU's public sector unions. This will help build unity on the ground around common problems such as retrenchments.
NEHAWU's CEC has opted for strong political oversight of the union's investments, which they see as an attempt to make strategic interventions in the economy.
Assistant general secretary Fikile Majola said NEHAWU's investments would strike a balance between financially sound investment and the union's political objectives.
The December 1997 NEHAWU CEC decided that the union should invest in areas where it organises to ensure its influence over the nature and direction of these investments. Criteria for investment should be job creation, benefits for members, to reduce the power and dominance of monopoly capital and to change patterns of ownership in favour of the working class.
Other CEC decisions were that:
The NEHAWU congress will debate a more detailed Investment Policy Strategic Document.
Organising public sector managers and the form this should take is one of the fascinating debates in NEHAWU which reflect the implementation of the union's strategic outlook.
"In the context of social transformation," says a NEHAWU discussion document, "public sector managers are located in positions that give huge potential in bringing about fundamental transformation and effective delivery of services."
Public sector managers are best organised on a political basis, not around collective bargaining rights, as with other public sector workers.
But how should the comrade managers' relationship with the union be structured? Should they participate in NEHAWU's regular union structures along with other NEHAWU members? Or should the union set up separate managers' forums within the union, which are accountable to the union's executive committees at branch or provincial level? These are questions which will be put to NEHAWU's congress delegates.
The union has begun to put forward initial ideas on what it calls a model of a transformative manager, bearing in mind its policy to build socialism now.
"WE must develop a vision of management that is consistent with socialist forms of work organisation and production," says NEHAWU.
The ANC's new secretary general, Kgalema Motlanthe, is well-known to the labour movement, where he has served as NUM general secretary and in the COSATU executive. He spoke to The Shopsteward about challenges of economic transformation and other tasks facing the ANC and the Alliance following the ANC's national conference in December last year
What were the main resolutions emerging from the ANC conference?
To give you some context, 74 resolutions were submitted to conference and, of those, only 26 were actually debated at conference and adopted.
Some of the adopted resolutions were referred to the NEC for cleaning up and to incorporate amendments that came from the floor during the plenary sessions. That process will be completed at the NEC Lekgotla from 20-22 February.
There were six broad areas that served as areas for commissions, ranging from building the ANC to macro-economic issues, issues of governance, social welfare issues. And the commissions were also divided into sub-commissions, so there were about 22 sub-commissions.
One of the weaknesses that has been identified is that the recommendations of the policy conference held prior to conference were not carried into conference commissions and debates in a very systematic way. So there was a bit of dislocation between the two processes.
But conference resolved on the key issues: the state and governance, building the ANC, social transformation, international relations, economic transformation and peace and stability.
One of the important resolutions was on the macro-economic issues, not Gear per se. This was also as a consequence of other processes prior to the conference. The Alliance Summit discussions had helped a great deal in ensuring that, by the time we went to Mafikeng, from the ANC side, it was clear that Gear was not cast in stone. The deficit targets set in Gear were not to be the only consideration. This also emerges from the speech that Cde Madiba gave in parliament this past week.
That is important, because it enabled Cde Madiba to identify the creation of jobs as a key goal and task facing the organisation. Coupled to the issue of job creation was the whole process of transforming the public sector, and the Alliance agreed that it would establish a working party on this under the president of the ANC. We have sent letters to both COSATU and the SACP requesting them to forward names of people who will represent them in the working party. So that working party should convene as a matter of urgency.
At the moment the air is filled with statements about possible retrenchments of teachers, and Minister Bengu insists that there has been no decision to retrench teachers. His explanation is that there are teachers who have been working as temporary teachers, some even for well over 10 years, and that all these people need to have their temporary contracts reviewed. That is the process that his ministry is involved in, either with the aim of confirming them as permanent teachers if their qualifications are correct and or allowing them to improve on their qualifications. But they cannot continue working under these conditions of casual contracts, because it means they are not entitled to all the long-term benefits as they are not regarded as permanent teachers. In some cases, no doubt it will result in job cutbacks, in other cases it will simply result in confirmation.
There is also the question of deploying teachers where they are needed most. And teachers who are not prepared to move from where they are presently deployed, tend to opt for packages and quit the profession, and it is that process which then creates an impression that there is wholesale retrenchment of teachers.
It is linked to the question of job creation and the president's emphasis on the fact that the public sector needs to be restructured and transformed. In provinces that have inherited more than one former homeland, it means that for every public post, they have two persons to fill one post. This is the case in the Eastern Cape, in the Northern Province and to some extent in Mpumalanga. That situation is untenable. It cannot continue forever because it means huge resources get consumed through salaries of people who are basically filling posts but are not performing any duties. The Alliance working party will therefore have to discuss the correct approach to address that situation. So these key elements hang together: the need to address the situation of temporary teachers, the need to transform the public sector and the whole question of job creation.
SADTU has expressed concern over the provincialisation of education. How do we as the Alliance ensure that we impact on government policy and implementation?
There is no doubt that the ANC and the mass democratic movement have got to drive these processes and work out approaches that would be properly managed. It can't be left to bureaucrats at provincial level only. There has got to be a systematic way in which these issues are handled. And that is why the convening of the Alliance working party is so crucial to begin to take control of these matters. That was agreed to by the entire Alliance and it is being activated by the meetings of the Alliance Secretariat. And that is why it is being headed by the president of the ANC, to give it that authority.
COSATU has welcomed much of president Mandela's speech in parliament but has expressed concern over these public service retrenchments. Could you tell us more about this?
In the speech itself, Cde Mandela was at pains to state that the discussions with the trade unions will have to commence first before that stage is reached. He was referring to the situation I have described, where you have bloated bureaucracies. The question is: do you continue to pay people for simply filling up posts without having any functions, or do you discuss with the trade unions and the Alliance an approach of how that could be managed. Because you want on the one hand to have a public sector that is service-oriented and efficient and on the other hand you also do not want to increase the army of the unemployed.
You want to create jobs so that those whose jobs are shared, in the process of transforming the state, should be absorbed in the new jobs that will be created. Hence these things tend to hang together, rather than being seen as separate issues. That is why, from the ANC's point of view, it is important that the speech should be discussed in its entirety, because it is very easy for people to simply focus on the part that deals with the need to downsize the public sector and be blinded to the other elements that call for job-creation and the Job Summit.
A highlight in the speech was when he gave recognition to a number of individuals and organisations that have excelled, through their own initiatives, in improving the quality of life of our people. Incidentally, the national winner of the President's Award for Community Initiative is an NUM project, the Mhala Development Centre, run by retrenched workers.
On the broader macro-economic issues, how did the Mafikeng conference take forward the Alliance Summit agreement?
At that conference, and in the commissions, there were lots of debates even in plenary. Delegates expressed themselves quite candidly. The Alliance Summit discussion documents had been circulated and discussed at branch level and provincial level and this helped to prepare delegates for that conference.
In the commission on economic transformation, there were very healthy and robust discussions. Because of the numerous amendments to the resolution, the plenary agreed that the amendments should be taken on board and that it should be presented to the NEC for final adoption.
What is the main thrust of the resolution on economic transformation?
It covers the main macro-economic issues, including the sensitivities around the deficit targets. There is no way in which the ANC government could disregard social deficits in pursuance of fractions of percentages. Madiba's speech put it that way. So the understanding and the approach is that it is not an ideological position, it is something that is informed as well by what the government has to deal with, the enormity of the accumulated problems.
At the same time, that must go with the necessary discipline, where you don't just spend for the sake of spending. So when students at the University of the Western Cape who have signed agreements that they will pay their fees are now saying, no, we don't want to pay, and they say that government must go and find the money, you don't just give in to those kinds of expenses. Because they have to meet their own obligations as well. So that kind of discipline will be maintained. But you don't then take the view that we must achieve such a target in terms of the financial deficits, regardless of whatever the consequences may be.
So the approach is to set targets for social expenditure and fix the deficit target in line with the need to meet social objectives, whereas with Gear it was the other way round.
Yes, that's it. The Gear thing, the problem with it was that it was said to have been cast in stone. And what these processes, the Alliance Summit, and the ANC conference, emphasised was that no policy is really cast in stone. Legislation gets adopted and amended. And so should it be with this macro-economic policy as well.
Do you feel that this is an important breakthrough for the Alliance?
I think it is an important breakthrough, yes. In fact, at the Lekgotla, this matter is going to be debated even further.
Will we begin to see the effects of that approach within government in terms of setting social expenditure targets and so on?
We have to prioritise. Unfortunately, there are enormous problems, accumulated difficulties, which do not lend themselves very easily to a simple hierarchical prioritisation. Every aspect is important. Education is important, and if you speak to people who are involved in education, in fact some of the students actually say, there is lots of money being wasted on other matters.
And if you come across someone who has witnessed cash in transit heists, they will tell you, crime is the thing. Let's solve crime and everything else will follow suit. And if you come across a job seeker, who has left his or her home somewhere in the rural areas and has come to Johannesburg with the hope of finding employment and has had to establish himself or herself in a shack in one of the informal settlement areas, that person will say to you housing is the thing. Let's put all the money into ensuring that nobody goes without a home. And those people would not even say to you, we actually have homes, we are here as job seekers, what we need is accommodation that would enable us to pay nominal rental and so on. So there are all these issues.
If you go to any labour office, the people there will tell you that job creation is the issue, let's get job opportunities created so that those who join in the labour force coming from the learning institutions should find employment, those who have been retrenched should find jobs. And if you go past any queue at this hour, people will be having to wait for two hours in a taxi queue because the taxi operators are fighting somewhere. They will tell you, if we could get busses, and trains, this is the thing, transport. Health care, it's the same thing.
All these issues are equally important, and of course there is going to be privatisation.
I think from the ANC side, what we need to improve on is communication, communicating the difficulties and the achievements, very clearly, to membership at branch level and within the MDM. That to me is very crucial. Because most of the time people rely on what they get through the mass media only. And the mass media is also driven by other interests, they want to sell newspapers.
Can we talk about organisational issues such as the character of the ANC, the implications of the ANC as part of the Alliance also being in government, how your MECs and MPs and so on relate to the organisation. What did the conference say about these issues?
The resolutions on governance and on building the ANC were an attempt to address those issues. And of course, they need to be addressed on an ongoing basis. Because you need people who are legislators and on the other hand you also need elected public officers who would do constituency work. And what we have at the moment is really both those responsibilities collapsed into one. That is why you find that ministers, who have departments to run, are also expected to do constituency work, and in the same way and to the same extent as all of us who have no such responsibilities. So it is an area that cannot be addressed mechanically, but one which we are going to have to address on an ongoing basis to find the correct balance.
And I think that goes not only for people in government, it also goes for ANC branches. Because there are lots of people who are located in other sectors, who are in the corporate world, who are in professions, who are members of ANC branches, or reside in communities, and who feel that the present situation does not present them with an opportunity to input into the major processes of policy formulation or implementation. So, in building the ANC structures, we have got to open up that space and create the opportunity for people who are branch members and have the ability and skills to intervene and input in major issues of governance to be able to do so.
On the other hand, we have to create the space for people who are ministers to benefit from those views and ideas coming from the branches and the provincial structures. So it is an ongoing challenge.
The ANC as an institution has to be structured in a way that enhances its capacity to equal the challenges facing it. Whether you are looking at headquarters or the provinces or the relationship between the ANC in government at the various levels and outside of government, there has to be a deployment of comrades in the fronts where they are needed most to enhance that capacity. That is a general mandate from conference.
The conference resolutions also informed the January 8 statement, and the central pillar is popular participation for consolidating People's power. In Madiba's speech in parliament, he was saying the same thing that government cannot be expected to deal with all these enormous problems all by itself, and that, in the main, it is popular participation that would solve these problems. On the issue of crime, for as long as society tolerates crime and criminal offences, so long will criminals and crime thrive. But as soon as the general public takes responsibility as well and begins to take action against crime, the criminals would be living on borrowed time.
How do you plan to revive the sense of the need for popular participation, as well as the campaign of moral regeneration that president Mandela spoke about?
It will start with local programmes. The structures at local level need to be assisted to develop local programmes. One of the examples that immediately comes to mind is around pensioners. You have senior citizens who have to wait for long hours in queues, even on bitterly cold and on rainy days, in order to receive their grants. An ANC or COSAS branch could run a local campaign on this. They could go to every household and if there is a pensioner, help that pensioner to complete forms, for instance, for a bank card. Or they could approach financial institutions or the ministry of welfare and population development to make arrangements. That is a service they could render in their own communities. The students as a body could do that and it would enhance their stature in their own community. They could undertake to check and monitor that on a monthly basis so that it's an ongoing process. And that would bring them into contact immediately with the senior people and they can in the process share their own problems with the senior citizens. So it's campaigns at that level, of that nature, which would bring about this process.
Who is going to drive this reactivation process?
I have held meetings with SASCO and COSAS. For example, there are many local councillors who have no skills in accounting, and structures like SASCO can in an organised fashion, be a support structure to them to ensure that they perform much more efficiently in local government structures. So it is campaigns at really local level.
From the workers' point of view, how you celebrate May Day could be at a very local level.
Let me share with you what I observed as very impressive at this year's January 8 rally in Moutse in Mpumalanga. Despite the fact that the posters announcing the rally went out on the 6th, there were no less than 13 different groups of old ladies in their sixties, who performed songs and dance, songs with lyrics they specifically composed for celebrating the January 8. What that said to me was that those old ladies did not start preparing for the January 8 celebrations when the posters came out. They did that towards the end of 1997. That's how we should look at all the major days, including May Day. It could be turned into a real family celebration, because the majority of people are working people, and its a paid public holiday for them. You could get different interest groups within the community to celebrate May Day by doing short inputs along with workers leaders. So that is how we could get more popular participation.
I have had a meeting with SANCO as well, and I said to them, they have got to open up their structures. They have got to strive to become a civic body which has as its base unit in the branches, all the households in any given residential area. So that they then address in the main matters pertinent to residents. If they do that, it would then be easy for the ANC branch members to participate as residents in those structures as well. If the ANC branch wants to extend its influence, it would earn that position of leadership within the civic branch in their own area of residence. And that would put paid to all this strife of people who are unable to be elected in the civic jumping into an ANC branch, and using their position there to fight against their erstwhile colleagues, and adversaries, and vice versa. Because then their responsibilities will be clearly demarcated.
COSATU is planning a mass recruitment campaign in April, in which our local structures will play an important role. How would you see the local Alliance structures becoming involved in that?
I think it is a good initiative. It would have to be planned very carefully as well, at what level do you recruit people into COSATU structures and at what level do you then recruit those people, or influence those people to take up ANC membership. That would have to be looked at very carefully, even on a case by case basis, because you DON'T want to confuse people. If you are recruiting a new member, if the entry point is around worker issues, then you would want the person to absorb that and then in due course indicate to this person that there are other aspects of his or her life that would be better addressed through ANC membership and vice versa.
Can you brief us on plans for the election campaign?
The ANC Lekgotla will come out with a programme of action which will be informed by the political report to conference, the resolutions, January 8 statement and the strategy and tactics document. We will also take into account other key campaign issues coming from the Alliance. And of course there is the need to put together an election machinery, because such a major campaign will have to be managed and coordinated as well. So there is an internal process of charging somebody with the management of the election campaign. And then, of course, there is the deployment of leadership people, from the NEC, parliamentarians, ministers and at provincial level.
The idea is that we would zone the country for campaign purposes. We would not want to go for centralised massive rallies. That would have to be a culmination of intense processes of mobilising at local level, and that is why it is not divorced from the processes of building the ANC structures.
COSATU congress spoke about the need to build the ANC and strengthen a working class perspective within the ANC. Could you comment on that?
The ANC would welcome and would always benefit from the efforts of COSATU to strengthen the working class bias within the ANC. The ANC itself is a broad organisation but its bias to downtrodden working people is something that working people have earned through their own participation within the ANC structures and in the struggle for liberation over the years.
But, like anything else, that cannot be regarded as a given. It cannot for a moment be regarded as immutable. It is something that can be changed. Therefore the endeavours on the part of COSATU to reinforce that are most welcome. Of course that kind of bias does not just come with numbers, it also comes with ideas Ñ the ability on the part of organised workers to look at issues and think through issues independently from a partisan point of view and present them in a programmatic fashion to the ANC structures.
Working people are the backbone and the basic constituency of the ANC. And if they bring with them enriched views on how the ANC should approach important matters of social transformation, that is how COSATU would be reinforcing the working class bias within the ANC.
It would not work that effectively if it is simply going to be in the form of resolutions, because when you interact at that formal level, it may not work that way. I think it would work much more effectively and have widespread impact if COSATU members are armed with these enriched views and are encouraged to take them through to ANC structures, so that in a real, practical way, when ANC members participate at residential or local level they are seen to be coming up with practical solutions to problems that affect the general population. In that way the stature and influence of COSATU within the ANC and the ANC within the broader society will be enhanced tremendously.
Having come from a strong union background, do you see your own role as falling within that context?
I would think that there is always a penetration of opposites. I went into the labour movement coming from the ANC, and now I'm coming back into the ANC coming from the labour movement. I would hope that I would bring a better understanding of where workers come from and why they view things in the manner in which they do now. And I would hope that I would be able to share with the comrades in COSATU how the thinking in the ANC is influenced and shaped, so that in that way we can achieve the necessary synergy between labour and the ANC as a broad organisation.
In your new role, how will you maintain contact with the perspective of organised workers?
My primary role is going to be coordinating the interaction of the ANC with components of the mass democratic movement and ensuring that the ANC as an organisation creates the kind of space I alluded to earlier on, for rank and file members to have their views and interventions in policy formulation heard and considered and also for the comrades who are in government to benefit from the views of general membership.
The advantage in the labour movement is that you deal with practical problems. Most of the problems are not abstract. For example, where issues of retrenchments may be abstract when you look at it from the point of view of a politician, for a trade union organiser it is a practical question, of firstly, to deal with issues of notice period, of retraining, the package itself. You have to deal with issues beyond such retrenchment as to what's going to happen to those workers, how are they going to eke out a living, and those are practical issues. But if you are now dealing with overarching policy, from the top, you may make certain assumptions. The trade union situation discounts assumptions. You make certain assumptions, but by and large, you are informed more by practical realities as well. You don't just deal with abstract problems. The gap between theory and practice is narrowed all the time. Because if your theory makes the problem disappear, the reality may be different.
What will you miss most about leaving the NUM?
Well, I am in a unique position because I hold two jobs actually at this point in time. I am only going to step down from the NUM next month.
The NUM is an organisation of really poor, downtrodden workers, whose lot is a continuous struggle. These are people who are separated from their families. When you work with them, you observe things that you would never notice if you are removed from them.
All the time it is an ongoing agony Ñ they would like to be with their families, but in the same breath know that being with their families will mean that they will have no bread on the table. Their jobs are so important, yet their families are also very important. You see that ongoing struggle all the time.
Would you like to give a final message to the NUM and other workers in COSATU?
My message to workers in general and other sectors of the MDM is that we have got to appreciate the opportunity that we have in terms of influencing the transformation process and the direction that this country will follow. It is an opportunity that we must grab with both hands and utilise.
If we appreciate this opportunity we will be in a position to create opportunities for the youth, for the next generation, and yet if we do not appreciate the opportunity that we have, we will do a disservice to the youth and the generation that is to come after us.
