Chairperson,
We are meeting barely two months away from the
8th National Congress. This
conference is being organised to take stock and assess our existing gender
policy adopted at the 7th National Congress.
Our task is to check whether we have indeed
moved away from slogan to practise as demanded by the congress. The forthcoming 8th National
Congress has to be different from other before it. We are billing as the perhaps the most important congress of
COSATU in our new dispensation. It is a
watershed Congress for two reasons.
First, it is a moment to pause and reflect on
our experience in the last nine years of democracy. Second, we want to use this
congress to unveil a long term plan towards our 30th anniversary.
The coming national congress will emerge with a programme to take us to our 30th
anniversary in 2015.
The programme will rest on two pillars, the
first pillar would be building the working class power and the second pillar is
the decent jobs. Everything we do
should be how we strengthen the trade union movement. Obviously a trade union movement that does not address women
oppression and discrimination is not a strong movement.
A revolutionary trade union must ensure that
women workers are empowered at the workplace and in the union so that they can
play the role that traditionally in our patriarchal society are reserved for
men.
The conference meets at the time when we are
moving rapidly towards the celebration of ten years of our liberation which is
also a year to renew a mandate of the ANC led government.
As we assess these 10 years we ought to start
afresh and remind ourselves of the strategic objectives of the NDR. We are involved in a protracted struggle to
liberate black people in general and African in particular.
Our NDR recognised all three contradictions –
that our freedom would not be freedom unless we simultaneously address the
national question, the gender and working class oppression. Ours is the radical NDR that analyse
problems we face from a class perspective.
Looking back, we can say that the working class
have gained a lot in the last nine years of democracy. From a gender
perspectives we can claim that black working class women have also gained from
democracy.
Some of the gains include access to basic
services, a democratic dispensation; progressive gender legislation, policies
and establishment of gender institutions; new labour laws, and so forth. We
have also noted that these gains have been offset by rising unemployment,
poverty and inequality.
The policy we adopted in 2000 and the policy
proposals that would emerge from this conference must make a contribution to
that liberation of women from their triple oppression. So, we are not just looking at the gender
question isolated from the NDR.
Our last national Congress, in 2000, emphasised
the need to elect more women as leaders, especially at shop steward level; to
empower women leaders; and to put more emphasis on negotiations around women’s
issues.
The Gender Conference aims to analyse our
successes and weaknesses in achieving these aims, so that our upcoming Eighth
Congress in September can improve our work in this area. Thus it is important
that gender transformation forms part of our long term plan. To that end, the
resolutions of this conference must find expression in our organisational
renewal plan.
Discrimination against women is still a problem
in our country, including in the workplace. That is why women need unions more.
On the shop floor, women’s work is still
systematically undervalued and underpaid, especially for black women.
Industries where women workers predominate - such as government services,
retail, clothing and food production and domestic labour - still have
relatively low pay and bad conditions. And women still find it harder to get
promotions and training opportunities, and are less likely to get promoted to
supervisory positions and management.
Furthermore, working conditions generally
ignore family responsibilities. Since in most families, women end up doing most
of the work to maintain the family, this imposes a particular burden on them.
Most of our workplaces do not provide childcare or flexitime; and time off for
family responsibilities and maternity is minimal.
These problems have become worse with the
spread of HIV/AIDS. Women almost invariably end up looking after family members
with HIV, which means they need more time off – and that often puts them into
conflict with their employers.
COSATU has long demanded that employers do more
to take women’s needs into account. Skills development and employment equity
plans must do more to increase the opportunities available to women, especially
black women.
Women also face problems outside the workplace.
Above all, they are hardest hit by unemployment. Again, African women bear the
brunt of the problem.
If we include people too discouraged actively
to seek work, the unemployment rate for women as a whole is almost 50%,
compared to 34% for men. For African women, however, the rate is even higher,
at 53%. And an astonishing 75% of African women under 30 years old are looking
for work.
Because it is still harder for women to get
jobs, African women make up only one in five formal workers – but they are half
of all the unemployed.
The situation has been aggravated by the
virtual freeze on the public service since 1994. For decades, nursing and
teaching were almost the only way African women could gain a professional
career. But this career path has been largely closed for almost ten years. As a
result, only 6% of African women under 30 have professional jobs, compared to
12% of older women.
We sometimes hear that unemployment results
from low skills. But according to government’s September 2002 Labour Force
Survey, African women in the labour force have a higher average education level
than African men – but they also have a much higher unemployment rate.
Many women also have to spend huge amounts of
time on household labour, because they still don’t have basic services such as
electricity and water, and because they have look after people with HIV/AIDS.
According to the Labour Force Survey, in 2002 one in ten African women spent at
least five hours a week fetching water, and one in seven spent that much time
collecting wood.
Finally, many women still face oppression, even
violence, in their families. This situation is aggravated because they face
such high unemployment, which makes it hard for them to leave oppressive homes.
At the recent Growth and Development Summit,
and in other policy engagements, COSATU has tried to ensure policies that will
address these joint problems of unemployment, poverty and poor basic services.
In particular, the agreement on expanded public works – including community
services such as childcare – and sectoral strategies are critical to generate
more employment.
COSATU is still working to ensure that these
agreements are implemented strongly – and that women get a fair share of the
new opportunities they create.
Privatisation poses a particular problem for
women. Current proposals for restructuring Eskom and Telkom seem likely to
reduce the access of poor people to basic infrastructure, especially
electricity and telephones. That will increase the burden of household labour,
which is still borne mainly by African women.
HIV/AIDS also sets particular challenges for
women. In many cases, women with HIV still face unbearable discrimination. They
have to worry about their children, and they often have to care for spouses.
For this reason, COSATU has called for massive education and prevention
campaigns – and for anti-retroviral treatment for all our people.
COSATU is proud to have contributed to the
decision to provide treatment in the public health system to prevent
transmission of HIV through rape and from women to children. These programmes
use targeted treatment with anti-retrovirals. Now we have to expand these
programmes so that all women have access.
This Gender Conference must reflect on our
efforts in all these areas. But it must also address the problems that COSATU
itself still faces in empowering women. Above all, our shopstewards and
leadership are still disproportionately men.
Even unions whose members are mostly women
still have mostly men leaders. And then there is the “deputy” phenomenon. That
is, almost all our affiliates have elected women in national positions; but
almost all of the positions are deputy presidents, or treasurers. The main decision
makers are still almost all men.
The problem starts at the shop steward level.
Our last Congress agreed to focus on ensuring that more women are elected as
shopstewards, to represent members in the workplace. This is the first step in
building women leadership in the unions. We need to evaluate how far we have
come in achieving the goals set in this area, and how we can strengthen our
efforts.
Still we should not lose sight of the visible
progress that we have registered in the last few years. Certainly there are now more women in the
COSATU CEC than was the case in the past. This shows that slowly women are
making it into senior leadership structures of the union.
Our test is to sustain and improve on the
progress registered in the last few years.
This also requires a brutal assessment of our organisational practices,
particularly the extent to which we have systematically addressed barriers to
women’s participation and changes in male attitudes.
In 1997, the 6th National Congress
adopted a policy on measurable targets. This was a compromise between those
demanding adoption of a quota system as the policy and those who were opposed
to it. The measurable targets meant that taking into account the percentage of
women workers in the federation we would over a period of time ensure that we
can measure whether our structures are representative or not.
That was six years ago, the measurable targets
are no longer good enough, we need a quota system adopted as the policy so that
the movement can be forced to deal with the challenge at hand. That policy cant be just applicable at the
federation level it must be forced at each an every affiliate of the
federation.
If women dominate the teaching and nursing
profession, the union structures must reflect just that. If men dominate mining
industry, the union structures must reflect just that. The office bearers were
defeated in this position in 1997, but now we working with all of yourselves
have to win this position.
We want to build the unions into an
even stronger bulwark for women, as workers and as members of our communities.
We must become a source of empowerment and protection for women workers, in
particular. Our Gender Conference should form a milestone in achieving these
aims. We need to invest resources and conscientise political leaders to provide
consistent leadership on gender issues. Unfortunately, on both counts, progress
across the Federation has been uneven.
As part of our organisational
renewal strategy, we need to address organisational strategies to gender
issues, including allocation of resources; establishment of gender
infrastructures, and a conscious strategy to push women demands in our
bargaining agenda.
However, for these demands to be
realised, women must take an active part in the organisation and engage in
struggle to change gender relations in our organisations, the workplace and in
broader society. Without struggle nothing will be gained!
On my behalf on behalf of the
National Office Bearers and the CEC I wish you the best ever conference and
looking forward seeing you working hard inside your unions to ensure that the
relations of the conference get adopted by unions so that they can be debated
in the floor of the National Congress
You have to succeed for the sake of
ensuring that our NDR remain true to its true objectives
Malibongwe
