Address by COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, Congress of South African Trade Unions, to the Opening of COSATU Winter School 2004, Willow Park, 3rd May, 2004

Dear Comrades and Friends,

Let me start by welcoming the national and regional office bearers of COSATU and our affiliates, our organisers and educators to this Winter School. We must also welcome the educators, staff and supporters who have agreed to act as facilitators for this important event.
Comrades,

This is an emotional moment for many of us, because this Winter School is a further proof of our success over the past four months in implementing the 2015 Programme passed by our Eighth Congress last year. It forms a milestone for the implementation of COSATU education programmes, and a key step in launching the Chris Hani Brigade.

The 2015 programme set key tasks for these four months since Congress. Above all, it expected COSATU to make a decisive input into the elections campaign, in order to ensure a voice for the working class in the government. We have succeeded in that campaign beyond our expectations. We have to thank everyone sitting here who contributed to that victory.

In addition, we have an annual responsibility to workers around the world to ensure that May Day, the Workers Day, is commemorated properly. Over the past weekend, thousands of workers heeded the call. By mobilising around May Day, we gave a further indication of our strength and solidarity with workers all over our country and all over our world.

This Winter School represents a further step in fulfilling the 2015 programme. A critical element of the Programme is to ensure ideological cohesion and clarity about the changing conditions we face as organised labour. The themes of this school therefore address central challenges, dealing with political economy, the role of women workers, international strategies, and building the Chris Hani Brigade. In addition, we have some important plenary discussions on crosscutting issues, including cultural struggles and campaigns on globalisation.

This school is critical because of the importance of ideological contestation as well as the need for thorough analysis of and reflection on the conditions of the working class. But we are not here just to think – we have the responsibility of developing ideas for stronger strategies for COSATU and the working class as a whole. As Marx says, “Philosophers want to interpret the world; the point, however, is to change it.”
Everything we do here must go back into our unions and the Federation, strengthening all workers. We need to remember the slogan that each one must teach one, rather than building a narrow expert elite. What is critical is how our learnings and proposals here vibrate in each union and local.

Comrades,
As you know, this Winter School takes place at a time when the labour movement, and South Africans as a whole, face severe challenges as well as exciting opportunities. Workers mobilised for the elections, not to give the ANC an empty mandate, but to ensure the government’s accountability to our people.

Chris Hani said South Africans are amongst the most politicised people in the world. That was clear on the campaign trail. Time after time, our people fearlessly told their leaders that they recognised and valued our achievements – but they also saw our shortcomings. Above all, everyone talked about the need to overcome unemployment, poverty and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
In political terms, we have made some progress in the past few years. Government has indeed moved away from the policies we protested so strongly around privatisation and budget cuts – the policies essentially contained in GEAR.

Today, government agrees with us on the need for stronger intervention to address poverty and above all create jobs. That agreement was recorded clearly in the Growth and Development Summit. But the strategies to achieve that aim have not yet been fully spelled out, and there is strong contestation within state structures and from parts of big business.

We see two basic strategies to create jobs. First, we need to integrate historically marginalised communities by providing infrastructure and skills, and transforming the financial sector and marketing outlets. Improving social protection through welfare grants and public works is critical in this context – and that means the budget must continue to grow strongly.

Second, we have to shift the formal sector toward job-creating growth. That is why the 2015 Programme emphasises sector strategies as a policy priority. This is the area where government seems most at a loss – it has agreed in principle on the need for sector strategies to create jobs, but when it engages provides little leadership and often falls back on measures to increase exports, rather than jobs.
In this context, we must ensure a special concern for unemployed young people. Unemployment runs at almost two thirds of those under 30 years old. This fact has enormous implications for our society.

In addition, we need a clear response to government efforts to support broadly defined BEE, but when implemented is narrowly increasing ownership and control by blacks in the formal sector. Certainly it is desirable for capital to be more representative, but this strategy can impose great costs and risks that must be managed. The GDS agreement in this regard must be implemented soon.
We also face challenges in the cultural and social sphere. Here, a central priority is to deal with HIV/AIDS in the workplace and our communities. Every union activist must also be an activist fighting the spread of the disease and building solidarity with people infected and affected with AIDS.

More broadly, we have to build a working class culture to counter the massive influx of consumerism since 1994. Our culture must continue to be characterised by solidarity with the vulnerable and oppressed, by dedication to transformation and freedom, by tolerance and collectivity.
Faced with these challenges, a critical question for the labour movement is how we best engage with policy, in the workplace and in communities. It is not our job to dictate and monitor every government programme, but we also cannot leave these issues to bureaucrats and consultants. We need to define our priority policy demands and find effective strategies to support them.
Workers can only engage effectively if they have strong organisations. The 2015 Programme identifies two priorities: improving service to members and a strong recruitment campaign.

Last year’s Central Committee and Congress developed detail proposals to revitalise our recruitment campaign. It required unions to identify unorganised workplaces, mobilise organisers and shopstewards to drive recruitment, and ensure the translation of membership cards into check-offs. We set ourselves a target of growing to four million members by 2009.

We have to ask if every affiliate and COSATU as a whole has begun to implement this commitment. Has every affiliate got a clear plan to achieve targets for growth? Have we deployed the resources and set up monitoring mechanisms to make sure our plan becomes a reality?
The 2015 Programme recognised that the basis for all our efforts must be worker control and service to members. Unions exist only for the sake of workers; if we cannot service our members, we have no reason to exist. We need to ensure that this Winter School strengthens our internal structures and ideological cohesion, and ultimately translates into stronger structures to defend workers’ interests and advance their demands.

In sum, comrades, today as always COSATU faces big challenges. This Winter School gives us a chance to analyse, reflect and share our experiences, and on that basis map the way forward based on implementation of the 2015 programme.
We are all lucky to have this chance, and must use it to the full. No other organisation in the country has the resources or strength to undertake this type of strategic exercise. If we use it properly, we will ensure that COSATU remains a force for transformation in the workplace, in each sector, in our communities and in the country as whole.