COSATU+2006+May+Day+Message



=COSATU 2006 May Day Message=

On May Day 2006, the Congress of South African Trade Unions dips its banners in memory of workers who were brutally killed by the police in the streets of Chicago 120 years ago. We salute workers all over the world, including those who perished in that struggle for shorter working days and improved working conditions.

We salute the millions who today join us, in the spirit of solidarity, in pledging themselves to a common struggle for a better world for all. In particular we extend our hand of solidarity to workers facing serious difficulties in Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Australia, Burma, Colombia, Sudan, Palestine and Cuba.

In our own country we are faced with a situation of farm workers who, as we celebrate today, are probably working in the farms without overtime or double pay for working on a public holiday. They, together with domestic workers, workers in small firms and the growing numbers of casualised workers, are the most vulnerable and exploited workers in our country. As we celebrate May Day we dedicate ourselves to a struggle to ensure we free these workers from the bondage or oppression.

We salute our founding President, Elijah Barayi who on this day exactly 20 years ago at the Jabulani Amphitheatre in Soweto, in the presence of thousands of workers, demanded that May Day be recognised in South Africa, forcing the stubborn P.W. Botha regime to eventually recognise this historic day.

We salute those COSATU members who died in our common struggle to raise the red flag and the millions more who were victimised, harassed, killed and dismissed by the bosses and their previous racist regime. Without sacrifices and selfless contributions of these heroines and heroes we would not celebrating May Day in conditions of freedom and democracy.

May is always an important month for the trade union movement. For COSATU, May 2006 is especially important. Our theme for May Day this year is a clarion call: //AIDS is the new struggle - Each one teach one! Test, treat and fight for life!//

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is a national disaster for South Africa. Over 5 million people are infected and official statistics indicate a huge rise in the number of deaths, particularly of people aged between 20 and 40. Infection with HIV and death due to AIDS is undermining millions of people’s hopes and livelihoods. It is entrenching and deepening poverty, but also robbing many people of the means to lift themselves out of poverty.

The impact of HIV is particularly severe on working class women and girls who, in addition to being more at risk of infection than boys and men, also carry much of the burden of care for people sick with HIV.

We salute health care workers, prevention and treatment activists and those Provincial governments (North West, Gauteng and Western Cape) that are genuinely struggling to provide treatment and care to people living with HIV/AIDS.

However, we lament the continued refusal of our national government to declare the seriousness of the HIV epidemic and to mobilise a response on the scale that is needed. Evidence of this is:


 * The continued impotence and ineffectiveness of SANAC,
 * The fact that in 2006 the country will have no national HIV prevention plan, and
 * The failure to roll out treatment with the urgency needed to save lives. Only 70,000 people out of an estimated 500,000 are receiving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment.

In addition there is the confusion about treatment being fuelled by the Minister of Health and her department’s refusal to act against pharmaceutical merchant, Dr Matthias Rath, and stop unlawful clinical trials and clinics that have already led to a number of deaths.

In respect of this crisis we recommit to our call for:


 * At least 200,000 people to be on ARV treatment by the end of 2006;
 * A national HIV prevention summit
 * Presidential leadership on HIV
 * The strengthening of SANAC into a meaningful partnership

Whilst we will continue to call on government and President to as elected representatives of the people lead the nation’s fight against the epidemic, we have decided to ensure that we play our own role as leaders of our institutions. Specifically, we must work together to mobilise our members and communities to:

1. Show solidarity with people infected and affected by HIV, ending stigma, discrimination and harassment. 2. Work to prevent new infections with HIV through both educational work and by ensuring that everyone, particularly women, can practice safer sex without threat and with access to information and male and female condoms. 3. Ensure that everyone who needs ARV treatment, as well as treatment for TB and other opportunistic infections, can get it from a clinic or hospital within a reasonable distance. 4. Put pressure on business to ensure that they develop workplace policy that will put an end to discrimination of infected and affected people including through ensuring that workers infected do get provided with ARV treatment and general support. In this regard we shall shame employers who won’t treat and support their employees in the May Day rallies. 5. Support orphans, vulnerable children and the ill, recognising however that the best form of support is to contain the epidemic, including through effective treatment, so that fewer people die. 6. Build a People’s Health Service with adequate human resources, decent conditions of employment for health workers and health facilities that meet the health needs of the population and respect people’s dignity. We reject the privatisation of the public health system, as foreseen in current proposals on Social Health Insurance. 7. Work with allied organisations such as SATUCC to develop common campaigns on AIDS across southern Africa.

We shall:

Step up our demands on the government to develop a national health insurance that will ensure the poor even greater levels of access to health care.

Convene a meeting with SANCO leadership to discuss the continued support of Dr Matthias Rath’s activities by some of its structures in particular in the Western Cape.

Build the broadest possible coalition, which should include all organisations of the people. In addition to the technical committee we have established, we shall establish a permanent commission to at the political level coordinate our response more effectively whilst helping to develop policies to respond to some of the challenges thrown up by the epidemic such as its impact on retirement funds, impact on health system in general and responses required, etc.

Our organisations have agreed to do more to empower our members to take both individual and collective action in these areas. That means we will do more to support both direct action and to continue to struggle for a more active and progressive role from state institutions and leaders.

As we celebrate May Day, with rallies across the country, we are using the day itself and the month of May, to take our Jobs and Poverty campaign to new heights, with strikes and marches in all the sectors of the economy.

COSATU launched its Jobs and Poverty Campaign in 1999 in response to rising levels of unemployment and poverty we were experiencing.

Do we still need that campaign today? We keep reading that the economy is booming and we are all getting richer. But no, it is not booming for millions of working people, their families and poor communities. That’s why we need more than ever to mobilise around this campaign, because for us the hard times continue even when the economy is ‘booming’. This is why:


 * Job creation is not going fast enough to dent unemployment. Millions of our people still can’t find paid jobs.
 * More and more jobs are poorly paid and insecure.
 * Union members face huge job losses in manufacturing and mining.
 * Public servants still suffer poor working conditions, often with very heavy workloads and responsibilities.
 * In the parastatals, privatisation of ‘non-core’ businesses continues to eat away at service delivery, employment conditions and public assets.

Already, since 1999, through strikes and other protest actions, we have been able to make all South Africans aware of the crisis of unemployment. It is now regarded by all as the principal challenge our country is facing. Our campaign has forced the government and the employers into two jobs and poverty summits, the last one the 2003 Growth and Development Summit.

These summits, with others held at provincial level, did agree on a number of important interventions to try and address the crisis at hand. Recently the government announced the “Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative” (ASGISA), which also contained a number of interventions, which we support.

In 1999 we together with FEDUSA and NACTU we called on workers to donate one day’s wages to a Job Creation Trust. With other donations we collected R89 million rands which, with interest and donations, grew to R112 million. Today we have dispersed R33 million and with a further R79 million committed to various projects all over the country. So far we have created over 30 000 jobs.

But these interventions have failed to resolve the principal challenges workers face - unemployment, casualisation and growing inequalities. And ASGISA too will not adequately address the challenge at hand, to the point at when we can say the problem has been resolved. That’s why we need to up the pressure.

In 2005 COSATU concluded that, in economic terms, big business has benefited most from our first decade of democracy. Profits have increased consistently and company CEOs rake in millions for themselves. ABSA’s CEO, Steve Booysen, received R11.03 million in the nine months to December 2005, and Whitey Basson of Shoprite Checkers got R57 million in just one year.

Government policies contributed to the boom for the rich. Exchange controls have been almost entirely eliminated, letting corporations take abroad millions that we need for reconstruction and development. Tax cuts have mainly benefited corporations and the rich.

Workers on the other hand have seen growing unemployment, deepening inequality and grinding poverty. Job creation is not going fast enough to dent unemployment, and we still face huge job losses in manufacturing and mining. Far too many jobs are being casualised and becoming poorly paid, insecure and with no benefits. Too many workers are victims of racism and other forms of discrimination in the workplace. Workers’ wages have stagnated. Today almost half of all workers employed in the formal economy earn less than R2500 a month.

The security guards who are currently on strike are a typical example of workers who are underpaid and ruthlessly exploited every working day. Most of them earn under R1500 a month, have no benefits and impermanent jobs, and face danger every day. Their demands are fully justified and we are 100% behind SATAWU. We have made an urgent call on the Minister of Labour, the CCMA and the employers to bring this bitter dispute to a speedy end, through a settlement that improves the lives of these workers.

Unemployment is particularly harsh for young people. Almost two out of three Africans under 30 years old can’t find a paying job if they want one. That dooms our young people to lives of dependency and hardship. Most union members must support young people who can’t find work.

We keep being told that economic growth has now taken off. But the economy is still growing much more slowly than in other countries – only about half as fast as China and India, for instance.

And it is not creating enough jobs even to reach the government’s modest target of cutting unemployment in half by 2014. In the past four years, the economy has generated only just over half the number of decent jobs needed to reach that goal. Each year, 350 000 jobs earning over R1000 a month were created. But 600 000 jobs a year were needed to reach government’s target.

And remember: even if joblessness fell by half, in line with government’s goals, one in five working people would be unable to find paid work. Unemployment and poverty would still be a huge problem.

In addition, the current growth spurt seems unsustainable and does not create quality jobs. Growth in South Africa today results largely from high prices for mineral exports. As a result, a lot of foreign funds have come into the country. That in turn fuels the overvaluation of the rand.

As a result, a lot of manufacturing and parts of mining are in deep trouble, with massive lay-offs. Imports have risen to record highs, undermining our own jobs. And if international mineral prices fall, the economy could crash, throwing even more people onto the streets.

This type of growth means that good jobs are under threat. Work is being created mostly in retail and construction, where many workers are poorly paid and casual. These jobs don’t pay enough to raise a family, and they won’t support long-term development and prosperity.

The crisis of joblessness and poverty affects public-sector workers, too. They still face overwork, crumbling buildings, a lack of materials like medicine and textbooks. Their managers often seem to think they shouldn’t have any rights. Then our nurses, teachers and police get blamed for every problem in service delivery.

In the parastatals, workers face the continuous threat of restructuring. Government still wants to privatise ‘non-core’ businesses. It plans to sell off our national assets piecemeal, without public accountability or consultation with the unions. That is why SATAWU had to launch a massive strike to protect the public’s interests in Transnet. In short, the boom of recent years has benefited mostly the rich, leaving workers to face high unemployment and low pay.

Now we face a new threat – the proposed WTO agreements on non-agricultural market access and on services – which if not drastically amended will lead to a catastrophe for workers and the poor in South Africa and the rest of the poor Southern half of the world.

It will make it virtually impossible for poor countries to compete with the rich and powerful Northern nations and lead to even more retrenchments, deindustrialisation and poverty.

The proposed tariff cuts will cut very heavily into our labour intensive sectors. For example, using the tariff cutting formula proposed by the developed countries (the so called Swiss formula) with a coefficient of 30 (the variable they propose that influences how steep the tariff cuts will be):


 * Tariffs in passenger vehicles would be cut from the current applied rate of 34% to a rate of 18.8%. This represents a real decrease of a massive 45.5%
 * Tariffs in clothing would be cut from the current applied rate of 40% to a rate of 18%. This represents a real decrease of a massive 55%.
 * Tariffs in televisions would be cut from the current applied rate of 25% to a rate of 15%. This represents a real decrease of a massive 40%.
 * Tariffs in furniture would be cut from the current applied rate of 20% to a rate of 12%. This represents a real decrease of a massive 40%.
 * Tariffs in final plastic products would be cut from the current applied rate of 20% - 25% to a rate of 12% - 13.6%. This represents a real decrease of a massive 40% to 46%.
 * Tariffs in auto components e.g. brake pads and lining would be cut from the current applied rate of 30% to a rate of 15%. This represents a real decrease of a massive 50%.

What do the European Union and the U.S. want from the WTO talks? In summary, they want:


 * To force developing countries like South Africa to cut tariffs even on vulnerable and new industries, like clothing and auto. That would lead to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Even worse, it would end any chance we have of developing new industries. We would be condemned to producing minerals and providing cheap services for ever. We would only be able to compete with other countries based on low pay, long hours and overtime. We would never be able to develop an economy for all our people, not just for the rich.
 * To let foreigners invest in providing basic services like water, electricity, health and education. That would make it harder for the government to subsidise these services for working people and the poor. It would make it more difficult to ensure services meet our needs, not just the needs of the rich minority.
 * To keep protecting and subsidising their own industries and agriculture, stopping developing countries from exporting to them. COSATU does not believe in free trade in principle, and certainly any changes in trade regime must protect workers in the North as well. But one fact cannot be denied: the rich countries of Europe and North America impoverished and looted most of the world for centuries of colonialism and imperialism. It is time they gave more back. It is time they let other countries have a chance to develop their economies to meet the needs of their people.

We call on all progressives at home and abroad to join the campaign and stop new forms of colonialism that will condemn all developing countries into exporters of raw materials and becoming tourist destinations for the citizens of the developed nations.

During May, we shall be holding pickets and demonstrations in the offices of the EU Commission, USA embassies and all European countries and their symbols in South Africa.

COSATU has declared that the second decade of democracy must belong to workers. It is easy to make declarations, but far more challenging to pursue a consistent and principled struggle to try and tilt the balance of forces in favour of the working class. To solve all these problems we need a comprehensive and coherent industrial strategy.

That is why we are taking our campaign to new heights, starting this May, because we know all too well that what we have not won in the streets we will not win in the boardrooms. This is a political campaign of the working class to ensure that they too benefit from democracy.

The organised workers are the leading detachment of the working class, who must lead the rest of the working class in this struggle, and COSATU is doing just that. Already since January 2006 COSATU locals have been compiling black lists of companies they are targeting through pickets and demonstrations. These include employers who retrench, casualise or use racism and other forms of discrimination against workers.

We have also called on public sector workers to compile lists of departments, like education, health and others, that either continue to casualise workers or fail to employ new staff and invest in the infrastructure.

We need to mobilise for decent work and an end to poverty. We need to ensure that shared growth becomes a reality. That requires the following:

1. The creation of decent, well-paid and secure jobs on a mass scale. That requires targeted government support for activities that can create decent work. It requires land reform and a review of all the major industries in the economy, including mining, manufacturing and agriculture, to see how they can contribute more to shared growth. And it requires measures to stop the massive inflow of speculative capital which is forcing up the value of the rand and killing our industry. 2. Our young people and workers must have equal access to education and skills. Even now, 12 years after we won democracy, Africans make up only about half of university students. Too many of our children must try to learn without textbooks or decent buildings. 3. Every community, not just the leafy suburbs, must get decent government services like education, health and policing. These services must be provided affordably, without cut offs or evictions for those who cannot pay. 4. The government must fulfil its promises to provide public works on a massive scale, so that unemployed people have a chance to contribute to their communities and earn a living.

At the political level, after twelve years of democracy has not changed the reality that farm workers occupy the lowest position in our society. At the other end of the scale are the still, mainly white, billionaires who own most of our industry and finance, and they are getting richer every day. This real elite and ruling class took a lion’s share of all benefits of economic transformation and integration of our economy to the global economy.

Now they are being joined by a small number of black BEE millionaires, and, scandalously a number of public officials who instead of dedicating themselves to the service of the people, are seemingly using their positions to enrich themselves.

We are sick of the growing number of allegations of public officials, from government ministers downwards, who have failed to declare that they have interests in private businesses. This is creating a clear conflict of interest. Recently it was alleged in the Mail & Guardian that five senior judges have stakes in businesses. One was the Judge President of the Labour Court, a court which deals with disputes between workers and employers. If there is a suspicion that the presiding judge has business interests, the impartiality and integrity of the court is bound to be questioned.

COSATU is demanding a thorough investigation into all these allegations, and firm action against any who may have broken the law. But more than that, we are calling for a return to the traditions and values of the liberation movement. We talk here about solidarity and willingness to serve without expecting any material gain in return.

Workers did not lead the struggle for liberation so that leaders can scramble on to the gravy train of personal wealth. This frightening level of greed and a developing culture of crass materialism threaten to put to an end to the very National Democratic Revolution whose objectives are still to be fully realised. A danger now exists that these noble objectives may be abandoned as the leader enters the race to get rich as quickly as possible through whatever means possible.

Most importantly it is not the wealth of our leaders that worries us, but the growing relationship between them and our class enemies. We fear that as this relationship grows individuals involved will gradually see the world from a point of view based on how they as individuals are impacted upon by political and economic processes.

Changing lifestyles and living standards, so that they become well above those who elected you, makes anyone to be a pretender. Acquiring new friends who also enjoy the same material conditions eventually leads to ideological floor crossing. This type of more dangerous floor crossing happens during golf tournaments, in the cigar association meetings, in the cosy dinners with expensive wines and whisky bottles offered freely and in conferences convened by the powerful multinationals and their political representatives from the north.

Before it is too late, let us again reiterate the call we have been making. The people’s representatives, in particular those serving in parliament and in the trade union movement, must choose between two things: being people’s representatives or business men or women. No one can be both! It is particularly scandalous for any unionists and or communists to try and double up as a workers’ messiah but their exploiter at the same time.

There is an inherent contradiction in being both! No one is capable of serving a lion and a lamb in the same kraal at the same time. You can’t be a people’s hero championing the aspirations of the working class and the poor during the day and at night exploit those very same workers as a business man.

The only way to ensure policies in favour of workers and the poor is to use our solidarity and our power. Only if we mobilise in support of our demands for decent work and an end to poverty can we win. That is why we have to make the Jobs and Poverty Campaign is a success.

We are taking forward this campaign during May, using May Day to mobilise for the strikes that are taking place in May. Each sector, with the unions specified, will have a strike:


 * Manufacturing: 9 May (CEPPWAWU, FAWU, NUMSA and SACTWU)
 * Public sector: 11 May (DENOSA, NEHAWU, PAWUSA, POPCRU, SADNU, SADTU, SAMA, SAMWU and SASAWU)
 * Mining and construction: 16 May (NUM)
 * Services: 18 May (CWU, PAWE, MUSA, SACCAWU, SAFPU, SATAWU, SASBO and parts of NUM and NUMSA which are organising parastatals)

We urge all workers, their families and communities to get involved in this campaign to fight the biggest social evils of our time - mass unemployment, gross inequality and terrible levels of poverty.


 * Patrick Craven (Editor, Shopsteward Journal)**
 * Congress of South African Trade Unions**
 * 1-5 Leyds Cnr Biccard Streets**
 * Braamfontein, 2017**


 * P.O.Box 1019**
 * Johannesburg, 2000**
 * South Africa**


 * Tel: +27 11 339-4911/24**
 * Fax: +27 11 339-5080/6940**
 * E-Mail: patrick@cosatu.org.za**

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