COSATU+stands+up+for+the+unemployed,+Tweedie,+Sunday+Times

Sunday Times, Business Times, Letters, Johannesburg, 06 August 2006
// WRITE TO letters@businesstimes.co.za//

=Cosatu stands up for the unemployed as well=

SAKHELA Buhlungu’s article, “Cosatu faces challenge from informal sector” (Opinion & Analysis, July 30), rests on a number of false premises. Together with the book //Trade Unions and Democracy// (edited by Buhlungu) upon which it is based, the article reveals an extraordinary blind spot in the collective vision of labour academics.

The idea that South Africa is facing a dramatic shift from formal to informal work — and hence a brand-new crisis of disorganised casualisation — is derived in both book and article from a single comparison between the years 1997 and 2001 (described as coming from “a recent report”!)

Cosatu’s own economist, Neva Makgetla, only last week rightly called this idea an “urban legend” and a “myth”. The share of total employment taken by the informal sector has remained stable at just under a quarter during the past 10 years.

This is not to say that Cosatu is not concerned about casualisation, labour-broking, informalisation, and other such phenomena, as well as outright unemployment.

Cosatu’s many statements and actions bear witness to this concern, which has been a basic part of the motivation of all trade unions for the past two centuries.

The omission from //Trade Unions and Democracy// (and Buhlungu’s article) of any reference whatsoever to Cosatu’s present, enormous Jobs and Poverty Campaign is therefore unforgivable.

Not only has the Cosatu campaign set South Africa’s moral, political and economic agenda, it has done so in spectacular style, with no less than two prodigious and well-timed general strikes and countless provincial and sectoral actions over the last two years.

This campaign is addressed precisely at the unemployed and the “unconventionally” employed, with a view to bringing them into the fold of organised production, for their own good and for the good of South Africa.

Defenders of the book cannot claim that the jobs and poverty campaign came too late for inclusion, by the way. If that was the case, then how was space found in the book for the contemporaneous “Zuma affair”?

Buhlungu’s false premises lead him off on too many other wild goose chases to mention here. Just one extreme example is the opposition of Cosatu to certain social movements that he wrongly implies.

Suffice it to say that Cosatu has no reason to quarrel with anyone working to organise the informal sector. On the contrary, such efforts are precisely in line with Cosatu’s aims.

Cosatu always recommends organisation on principle and stands ready to assist the organised oppressed wherever they are found.


 * Dominic Tweedie, editor, The Shopsteward (Cosatu)**


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2167949**

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