Address Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, to POPCRU 6th National Congress 11 - 06 - 07

 

Zwelinzima Vavi's Speech to POPCRU's 6th National Congress - 11 June 2007
Theme: Consolidating the workers' power and advancing transformation within the criminal justice cluster!

President Zizamele Cebekhulu - Linda, Mkhonto, Ntsele, Mafu, Ntshosho, Zwane, abanye bayayibalekela

General Secretary Abbey Witbooi - Mgiqwa - Jikijwa, Ntshinga, Nkosana Mvaba

Members of the National Executive Committee

Invited guests from abroad and the home front

Comrades and friends,

I am grateful for the chance to address your Congress. This is a particularly welcome honour as the public service workers, including the police and correctional officers, today face one of their greatest struggles.

For the first time, we have seen all the public servants come together in a massive and indefinite strike. The unity displayed, together with militancy and the willingness on the part of the workers themselves to make sacrifices, has gone beyond our widest expectations as trade union leaders.

A foundation has been laid for the creation of a single federation and to move decisively for the realisation of our longstanding principle of one union in one industry.

This action demonstrates that the public service unions, which could only achieve their full strength with the end of apartheid, have truly come of age. I have nothing but praises for all the public sector workers who, in the face of intense intimidation by the state and political blackmail, have stood steadfastly behind their legitimate demands.

The current struggle places huge challenges before us. We need to use this congress to reflect, so that our strategy and tactics contribute, not only to an urgent victory in this strike, but to the long-term transformation of the public service and indeed our entire society. At the same time, we need to ensure that this strike strengthens the solidarity of all public servants and of the working class as a whole.

My task here is to review some broader political and economic developments that affect the labour movement.

Politically, COSATU has long recognised that the national democratic revolution (NDR) is at a crossroads. The coming year will determine between two paths. Either the state will become a tool of reformists, who seek to entrench the power of capital, with only modest improvements in services for the poor, or it will move decisively away from the GEAR paradigm, and become a truly developmental state able to implement policies to transform the economy to benefit the majority of our people.

The coming months will determine whether the country will maintain the status quo. This means maintaining the current economic policies that have seen most economic benefits accruing to white monopoly capital, while the Alliance and ordinary ANC members remain marginalised from policy processes.

The coming months will in part answer the question whether our NDR can be put back on course and make the questions workers have began to ask on whether the NDR has failed the working class irrelevant?

Can we change the current politics of growing crass materialism, self serving individualism, back stabbing, the use of state institutions to fight factional battles, the death of the culture of debate, and the centralisation of power that leads to marginalisation, divisions and careerism?

Can we as a movement go back to basics and put the interests of our people at the centre of all Alliance and state programmes? Can we return to the best traditions of our movement - the traditions of selflessness and solidarity that guided our struggle - instead of the current ideology of the survival of the fittest and law of the jungle? Can we begin to compete on the basis of service to our people instead of competing on material issues such as biggest house, flashy cars, etc.?

The choice of leadership and core policies for our movement in the next few months will play a critical part in determining which path we take. The CEC has adopted a document on leadership that stresses the need for COSATU and the democratic movement as a whole to make a reasoned collective decision in this context. We cannot let ourselves be swayed by short-term emotions, or adopt positions that will divide the majority of our people. We need to find leaders:

· Who have demonstrated their consistent and principled support for working-class positions on economic policy, building democracy, and core social issues like labour rights, HIV and gender,

· Who have the depth of experience and character to resist the pressures and temptations they will face in office, and

· Who will build the ANC and the Alliance as the key organisations that give voice to working people and the poor?

We can no longer avoid the responsibility of delegating strong leaders for our movement. COSATU must ensure that the working class has adequate representation and participation in its future.

This was what the 2015 plan sought to do - to strengthen the organisation and representation of working people and the poor, and to place workers in the forefront of the transformation of our country. The coming months will determine the progress we are making in ensuring that workers swell the ranks of the ANC and the SACP to reposition these Alliance formations to maintain and deepen their bias towards the workers and the poor.

A crucial milestone in this process will be the ANC Policy Conference next month. If the conference endorses the current ETC paper as ANC policy, we must know that we are finished as the working class.

The current proposals essentially seek to maintain the current confused state of the NDR. They do not rigorously address the key issues we have been raising, although they pay lip service to our concerns in some areas. They don't form the basis for a new developmental path based on fundamental restructuring of the economy toward a new path of massive job creation and eradication of poverty on a mass scale.

If in this Policy Conference the current proposal for the Strategy and Tactics document goes through with only minor changes we must know that our liberation movement has adopted the route of strengthening the bourgeoisie and embracing its ideology.

The papers of on the role of unions and the working class are all clever statements full of left-wing rhetoric but their essential message to workers is that they must go back to the factory barracks and not engage with the political transformation. We are being told that we must concern ourselves only with gumboots, safety helmets, overalls and wages and not whether our NDR is on course and which class it seeks to reinforce.

We are being told that the international balance of forces gives us no option but to accept the phenomenon of casualisation and destruction of secure and better paying jobs. To fight against these global ills we are being told will not help us attract the necessary investments to our country.

Insistence on global justice for workers and the poor make us candidates to be labelled 'ultra lefts' who want a giant leap forward and who do not understanding the international balance of forces.

The economic challenges arise in the context of a new phase of economic development in our country. Business and government spokespeople like to stress that the economy is growing faster than it has for decades. They repeat this so frequently that there is a real danger that ordinary people may now start to believe this message.

But this economic boom does not signal that all is well in the economy, or that current economic policies are doing enough to achieve even the modest AsgiSA targets of halving unemployment and poverty. Unemployment still runs close to 40%, and the majority of households remain under the poverty line.

Virtually all employment creation in the past five years has occurred in the informal sector, construction and retail. These jobs are generally casual and poorly paid. Moreover, growth in these sectors is highly cyclical, and not likely to continue at the same rate as in the past.

These propagandists ignore altogether the plight of the majority - that 54% of all people employed in the formal economy still earn less than R2500 a month, 30% earn less than R1000 and just over 16% earn less than R500. They ignore the salaries earned by the Chief Executives in the private sector.

In fact when they talk about these scandalous salaries they speak in glowing terms as if they have won some trophies after a tough competition. When they speak about the richest people they do not consider that the riches and opulence of these very few individuals explains the poverty of the many.

The first 13 years of democracy have seen most benefits enjoyed by the few. It is from this standpoint that COSATU and the SACP have called for the second decade of freedom to be the workers' and the poor's decade.

Already we have lost three years of the second decade of freedom. We are left with seven years to turn the situation around. Judging by the current trends it appears we won't succeed.

The fundamental question that we must ask is what will we do about that. How could it be possible that the working class led the struggle for freedom and yet the main beneficiaries of that freedom remain the very capital that had a good time even during the apartheid days? We have already warned that the implications of this will be the devastation of our Alliance and the political system as a whole.

Going to Gauteng to the ANC National Policy Conference means fighting to reverse these trends and not to maintain the status quo camouflaged in left wing and Marxist jargon.

When we attend the SACP National Congress in the Nelson Mandela Metro in July we must have only one objective - to build a strong SACP capable of leading not only the workers and the poor but also the entire society.

When we attend the ANC National Congress in December in Polokwane we should have only two objectives - to maintain and deepen the bias of the ANC towards the workers and the poor and to reverse the trends we point out in this input.

We need government to do much more to create stable, high-level employment if we want to overcome poverty and unemployment. The expansion of the public service is critical in this context.

In addition, we have seen persistent casualisation and downgrading of employment for workers. In virtually every industry, the share of atypical workers has increased in the past five years. Already 60% of all workers employed in the construction sector are employed on a temporary basis. 30% of all workers in the mining industry are casual and temporary workers. The reality of what we see in the retail sector in this regard is frightening. That can only undermine workers' ability to organise, as well as worsening workers' conditions. This can't be allowed to go on.

COSATU has welcomed government's new commitment under AsgiSA to halving unemployment and poverty, and to an industrial policy that can ensure restructuring of the economy to achieve this aim. But we have not seen a consistent programme to achieve these ends. Instead, in too many cases, government policies seem designed to reassure business at the cost of workers and the poor. Too often, government emphasises the need for macro-economic stability - which has become code for reducing the burdens on capital at the cost of the majority of our people.

Comrades, we are meeting in the midst of a huge public-service strike, the largest and most solid we have ever experienced. This strike brings together workers from nurses to corrections officers, from cleaners to educators. It is an expression of the solidarity and strength of workers.

As always, in negotiating from this basis of strength, public servants have to make difficult choices. We are concerned, in particular, that the employer is trying to make public servants accept a trade off between maintaining real wages and transforming the remuneration and benefits structure of the public service to ensure greater equity.

In this context, we need to keep cool heads, to think clearly and reflect. We have to ensure a principled stand that protects both the public service and the public.

A particular problem has been the efforts of the employer to split the police from the rest of the public service and use them to repress workers. This emerges both in the unconstitutional insistence that the Police Act forbids any pickets, and in the effort to use police violence to stop workers from demonstrating.

We look to POPCRU to answer these dirty tactics with intensified educational work and more decisive tactical interventions. We cannot let one group of workers - the police - end up shooting at or harassing another group, which is indeed striking on behalf of the police as well as all other public servants.

More generally, we have to pay tribute to POPCRU as a mainstay of the public-service unions. Your union has truly taken the process of organisational development to heart. You have taken forward our commitment to uniting all the workers in each sector under our affiliates. You have managed to maintain solidarity through difficult strikes in sectors still known for repressive labour relations.

In particular you fought against the super exploitation of correctional services staffers and when the government dismissed those who participated you successfully won the battle. I know the battle has to be fully won regarding the need to fill vacancies and to remunerate for overtime worked. Congress resolutions should look at how we take this forward.

When the National Treasurer presents his report many will see the full strength of the union. Moving from a situation very familiar in the past to the current situation where the union's finances are in a good state of health means that we are making huge progress. The relationship between a good financial base, a good state of organisational structures, and greater levels of unity means that POPCRU is in a better position to service its members and to improve their conditions of employment.

This success is due to the activism and vision of your shop stewards, members and leadership. But it also rests on the solid organisational foundations laid during your organisational review. This is what the 2015 Plan is all about and I am happy that your congress theme is reinforcing this effort. We commend and salute each one of you for this progress.

What is more heart-warming is that all the leaders of the union are police and correctional services personnel themselves. These successes are registered through their stewardship. Our challenge is to continue to do the right things we have been doing and look at ways in which we can improve and address all remaining weaknesses.

Comrades, our next step is to win the strike. On that basis, we must continue to struggle for a genuine transformation of the public service, including police and corrections, as still the least transformed or democratised sectors of government. Above all, we must fight for:

· Adequate staffing in all parts of the public service and the country, with better in-service training for all members,

· Meaningful career pathing for all public servants, from cleaners to police and corrections officers to nurses and teachers,

· The establishment of participatory democracy that will empower both workers and communities in making and implementing policies that affect their lives.

Wages of police and correctional service staff must improve. We cannot win the battle against the criminals if we still rely on police and correctional services who are demotivated because of unacceptably low pay. Police should not be forced to continue to chase armed dangerous criminals for such low levels of pay.

Correctional services should no longer continue to be expected to look after the most dangerous criminals and ensure that the type of stuff, whatever it was (black substance in a bottle) that the father of Ananius Mathe was sneaking into the cells is confiscated. This is a dangerous job - we need an increase in danger pay allowances, not these peanuts the government seeks to give us.

Government has sought to present all workers as being an irresponsible lot who are prepared to risk the future of our children and even lives in pursuit of their selfish and narrow interests. From the beginning the government has counterposed the need for improved working conditions and wages with the need to provide a service as if there was a contradiction between the two.

Of late every delay, and the historic inefficiencies of the public hospitals, are blamed on the strike. Every death, however unrelated, is blamed on the striking health workers. Every inconvenience the public suffers is blamed on the strike. There is a danger that the public may believe some of the media houses and the government.

Let us all remind all of the facts they know. No one can deny that government pays its workers very low wages. It is this fact that has led to the mass exodus of nurses and doctors from the public sector. It is these low wages that makes police officials vulnerable to persistent attempts to bribe them. It is these low wages that have led to low levels of morale across the public service. It is low wages that drive many police officials to commit suicide.

It is the failure to fill vacancies that are now estimated to be 250 000 that have increased the workload of every civil servant. It is the failure to invest in the infrastructure and equipment we need that has led to long queues and debilitating buildings where the nurses are supposed to save lives. It is the systematic lack of investment in the police stations that has made police to lose the fight against criminals.

For decades people have suffered in these long queues in public hospitals, died in the smelly wards often without fresh linen, in some cases without even painkillers. Must we now forget the pain of many families who had members of their families turned away from the public hospitals to die at home from AIDS due to overcrowding and the general inability to care for them.

Today when anybody dies we are told it is related to the strike. We have called on the government to negotiate a minimum service agreement with the unions so that we end the current confusion and disagreements about who are truly in essential services. Government has consistently refused to do so. Government must therefore take the full blame for any confusion and the resistance by the public sector workers to be declared essential service.

All workers can see that the government as the employer is using the catch word 'essential service' to deny as many workers as possible their constitutionally guaranteed right to strike.

COSATU and the trade union movement in general need not to be lectured amount the morality of essential services - we know that there are jobs that fall under essential services. That is why from 1999 we have calling on government to negotiate minimum service levels. They have refused because they want us to be weak.

They want to transform the principle of collective bargaining to collective begging which is what would happen if every worker were declared essential service. So we say to government, instead of threatening people with dismissal and compounding problems, it is not too late to negotiate minimum service agreements and avoid the confusion that has led to some workers abandoning workplaces that should be manned 24 hours.

To the public we say - maintain your support for the genuine and legitimate demands of the public sector workers. They are your servants and you need them happy so that they can provide a better service. Instead of engaging in unhelpful finger pointing and point-scoring the government must revise their offer and ensure that the strike is ended soon. No amount of blackmail and dismissal of workers will provide a solution.

On behalf of the COSATU Central Executive Committee and the 2 million members of COSATU, that includes yourselves, I wish you a successful congress.

Forward to victory of the public sector workers

Forward ever and backward never