Address by the Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, to SAMWU rally 09 - 10 - 07

 

Zwelinzima Vavi - COSATU General Secretary Address to SAMWU 20th Anniversary celebrations

President Petrus Mashishi

General Secretary Mthandeki Nhlapo

National Office Bearers and members of the CEC

Members, activists and staff of SAMWU

Invited guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

Comrades

It is a huge honour and privilege to be invited to address this historic rally to commemorate 20 momentous years of struggle by municipal workers.

Your union, and its 120 000 members, have always played a central role in the labour movement, in the broader liberation struggle and in the public sector. You have always been one of the rocks on which COSATU is built.

You have done much to shape our policy on the restructuring of local government, and the provision of water, electricity and other basic services. You have upheld all our best militant traditions - worker control, internal democracy, service to the membership, confronting political and socio-economic questions and working closely with the poor communities that your members serve.

It was in the middle of the state of emergency and during the dark days of apartheid repression, but in the wake of a sustained assault on the racist regime by our people led by the working class, that fewer than 20 000 municipal workers came together to launch SAMWU.

Creation of SAMWU not only helped to maintain the momentum but helped workers and their families to deliver even more telling blow to the white minority rule. We must never forget the sacrifices that all workers made in the heroic struggle for democracy and majority rule, which led to the breakthrough of 1994.

We are now free and enjoying the fruits of liberation - thanks to municipal workers, and thanks to the leadership role that the working class played. We have a democratic constitution, laws that protect worker' rights and freedom for workers to organise, strike and demonstrate. Many workers have been able to negotiate improvements in their standard of living and far more families and communities now enjoy access to basic services, which used to be the exclusive preserve of a white minority.

SAMWU itself has made many big advances, including:

a.. Getting a minimum wage in the sector, which has particularly benefited rural workers,
b.. Forcing the employers into centralised, annual wage bargaining,
c.. Building a strong presence in the SA Local Government Bargaining Council which has prevented individual employers from downgrading working conditions,
d.. Introducing worker-controlled Social Benefits schemes like SAMWUMED, the SAMWU Funeral Scheme, the SAMWU Saccol which freed municipal workers from the clutches of the loan sharks, and the SAMWU National Provident Fund; and
e.. Forcing councils to start contributing to many workers' pension funds for the first time.
Today we not only recognise but we are here to celebrate these improvements.

We are aware that we still face many challenges and the task of transformation is far from complete. In economic terms, our people have not been liberated. Many of the millions who are unemployed or whose jobs have been casualised are even worse off than under apartheid. Around 20 million of our people are still mired in poverty.

Inequality has actually widened, as the rich minority of capitalists and bureaucrats have got even richer. Our wages, despite our militant efforts to improve them, remain very low and have stagnated during the past 13 years of democracy.

As the declaration of our recent Central Committee said: "Despite progress recorded in the last thirteen years, the capitalist class gained the most in economic terms. Workers have to contend with poor quality jobs, poverty and unemployment and millions of workers do not enjoy the fundamental rights enshrined in our labour laws. While the Constitution is progressive, the substantive realisation of the rights it embodies remains a promise on paper. The country's economic policy, including the budget, is not based on the promises of the Constitution."

I had the honour to participate in your Eastern Cape provincial celebrations last week. They have pointed out other massive challenges, including:

a.. Attacks on union leaders, including suspension and dismissals for apparent political reasons by employers,
b.. The privatisation of services in municipalities, which causes hardship to communities,
c.. The use of labour brokers, who keep most of the money paid to them by the municipality as personal profit while paying workers a slavery wage of R67 per day without benefits.
d.. Provincialisation of primary health care, which seeks to deprive communities' basic right to health by taking services to provincial government.
e.. Sexual harassment in the workplace and insensitivity to HIV positive workers.
f.. The employers' failure to ensure that job descriptions are finalised, thus delaying job evaluation.
g.. Disparities whereby employees are being paid differently for the same job

Lastly they identify the serious problem of poor health and safety in the workplace, tragically demonstrated by the recent blast at the Plumstead electricity substation. I send COSATU's condolences to the family of your member who lost his life and best wishes to those who were injured in the blast.

Research in Cape Town has shown that the city continues to seriously neglect the health and safety of its workforce. During 2005 and 2006 when the research was carried out, three workers were killed and the research uncovered more than 60 illegal hazards that Cape Town workers are exposed to.

The Plumstead tragedy and the appalling number of recent fatalities in the mines bring home to us the crucial importance of trade unions in fighting to improve this country's terrible record in health and safety at work.

Comrades

The main reason why workers and the majority of our peoples have not reaped the fruits of liberation has been the government's disastrous economic policies, typified by privatisation and GEAR, which have led to the scandalous situation of a supposedly 'booming' economy that still leaves almost 40% of workers unemployed, 40%-50% of the population facing grinding poverty and one of the highest levels of inequality in the world.

This situation is made even worse by the disastrous policy of regular increases in interest rates, like the latest just two weeks ago. It is a policy, which deters investors from starting new businesses and creating new jobs, and makes existing businesses struggle to survive, with the danger that they will shed jobs to cut costs.

As a result, the rate at which jobs are being created is nowhere near what is needed to meet even the modest ASGI-SA target of halving the 2004 levels of unemployment and poverty by 2014. Added to this is the continuing problem that far too many of the new jobs that are being created are casual, temporary, insecure and low-paid, especially in construction and retail.

As if this negative impact of the interest rate hikes was not serious enough, they have also directly cut workers' standard of living by raising repayments on bonds and on goods bought on credit. Yet meanwhile, inflation, the very problem that the Reserve Bank claims to be tackling, is skyrocketing upwards, particularly the costs of most basic foods, like bread, milk and maize meal.

Given all these problems that more and more workers are facing, it is no wonder that we have just experienced the biggest wave of industrial action our country has ever seen since the democratic breakthrough, in nearly all sectors of the economy including in the public sector.

For the first time, all national and provincial public servants came together in a massive, indefinite strike. The unity they displayed, together with militancy and the willingness on the part of the workers to make sacrifices, went beyond our widest expectations. I must also pay tribute to the solidarity action taken by SAMWU members, in the great tradition of the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.

As the declaration of the September 2007 Central Committee said, "These strikes were important in asserting workers' power and building the unity of the working class across skill, occupational and gender divide. They were triggered by the realisation that the bosses have enjoyed a bonanza of high profits and high pay while workers incomes have virtually stagnated. The working class is no longer prepared to sacrifice all for the benefits of bosses while they work harder but getting poorer."

A significant improvement in wages was negotiated and we moved significantly closer to our long-term goal of building a single, strong public-service union and one mighty, united federation. I am confident that SAMWU will play its full part in this ongoing process. As the recent strike proved so brilliantly, the more united we are the more we can win for our members.

Comrades

As we move closer to the ANC Conference, we are stepping up our campaign to convince the ANC delegates to adopt policies that will ensure that the next seven years of the second decade of freedom belong to workers and the poor. Contrary to Terror Lekota's scandalous accusation that the federation has put forward no alternative policies, COSATU has developed and will be presenting to the public in the run-up to the conference, many important new policies.

Their central theme was encapsulated in our Jobs and Poverty Campaign June conference declaration, which in turn was inspired by the demands of the Freedom Charter.

It called for a more interventionist state that will be on the side of the poor and working people. It demanded full employment, a review of the Expanded Public Works Programme and a campaign against casualisation and informalisation of employment as they serve only to weaken employees' bargaining power.

It called on government to refocus its resources to intervene directly in addressing poverty, unemployment and inequalities. "These," it said, "cannot be left to the mercy of market forces that have no track record of providing services to the poor outside the logic of profit maximisation".

It demanded an acceleration of land reform, a rapid move towards the goal of quality, public universal and free education, a radical improvement in health care and social security for all, and many other progressive policies.

One of our biggest problems however is that when we have put forward such policies in the past, we have struggled to get them implemented, and government has continued to adopt pro-business economic policies. One of the main reasons for this is that the Alliance that should be leading the National Democratic Revolution has been sidelined. Even the ANC is not consulted, let alone its partners. Government officials and technocrats devise policies and then present them as a fair accompli for what is usually token and meaningless 'consultation'.

So we are now striving to formalise the relationship between COSATU and its partners through an Alliance Pact, which will oblige government to discuss all new policies with its allies. The Pact will also set up structures to monitor the implementation of those policies. This must be a bottom-up strategy, which gives the rank-and-file a central role.

We are convinced that this will help to lead to a radical improvement in the way the country is run and get us back on the transformation track. It should also help to ensure that the fight against unemployment and poverty become the top priorities, above all others, and that no vested interests stand in the way of transformation.

We also want to see a new leadership that shares these ideals. A number of the current generation of leaders have been seduced by the values of the capitalists and their 'get-rich-quick and to-hell-with-the-rest' mentality.

Far too many political leaders are directly or indirectly benefiting personally from business interests, some of which are helped by government contracts and tenders, including those involved in BEE deals which benefit only a handful of the formerly disadvantaged people and bring no benefit whatsoever to the majority.

This has to be stopped. We need leaders who, in the great traditions of the ANC, expect no personal reward for serving the people who elected them. We want leaders whose policies will be guided by the needs of the people, not lobbyists for the rich and powerful. That is why we make no apology for campaigning for leaders who we believe best fulfil these criteria.

Comrades

One of the struggles that you took on when you formed SAMWU was to destroy the undemocratic apartheid local government structures, both the all-white councils and the phoney 'black' authorities, both of which were steeped in corruption, which SAMWU was determined to stop.

Today, sadly we must still fight against corruption and nepotism within what should now be democratic authorities but which all too often are still tarnished with the abuse of power to enrich individuals.

As I said when I addressed your national Congress in 2003, "We must continue to confront those who use their power to deepen the misery of our members, even if we have elected them to positions in our structures. Corruption, comrades, is corruption. We cannot have another way to describe it - no matter who practises it, no matter how incomparable their struggle credentials look. Corruption is corruption, and it must be defeated in SAMWU just as it must be in government and the private sector."

A critical challenge we face now is to meet the target we have set of doubling our membership by 2015. That means that we must grow 10% a year for the next few years, reaching membership of over four million in ten years. SAMWU has grown six-fold over 20 years, from 20 000 to 120 000. That proves that our target is not utopian but absolutely possible and it is absolutely necessary.

We urgently need also to recruit the growing army of casualised and vulnerable workers into our ranks - domestic workers, hawkers, gardeners, all those struggling on their own to try to eke out a living.

We must also not forget the swelling numbers of immigrant workers, especially the estimated three million from Zimbabwe, who have been forced to flee their homes in a desperate search for an income. We must not allow unscrupulous employers to get rich by exploiting them as cheap labour and under-cutting our own members at the same time.

Finally, Comrades, COSATU and SAMWU must contribute to the resurgence of the African trade unions and play a central role in developing the perspective of the international trade union movement.

We need a better coordinated international policy that contributes in the struggles to build a better world, based on equitable redistribution of resources, closing the growing gaps between rich and poor countries and defeating the moves by the rich Northern countries to impose new trade rules which could devastate the poor Southern nations and drive us back into the poverty and slavery of our colonial past.

On behalf of the COSATU National Office Bearers and all out 1.8 million members I wish SAMWU and all your members success in its next 20 years, as part of a powerful and fast-growing public service trade union.

Viva SAMWU Viva!