COSATU+supports+strikers+and+draws+lessons



=COSATU supports strikers=

The Congress of South African Trade Unions declares its full support for the many workers who are currently involved in strike action in support of demands for better pay and conditions. They include the Kumba mineworkers, the contract cleaners, Kraft Foods workers and Shoprite Checkers staff.

These workers all have one thing in common: they are amongst the lowest paid and most exploited but work mainly for large companies that pay massive salaries to their senior managers. For example:

· The Chief Executive Officer of Kumba, Con Fauconnier, is resisting the unions' demand for a modest increase of 10.5% for the lowest paid workers and 9% for the rest, yet he awarded himself a 35% increase last year, and is offering only 8% and 7% rises to the workers.

· Shoprite CEO Whitey Basson took home R58.9 million in 2005, but agreed to pay a mere 7% increase to its 52000 workers in 2005 and is now resisting a demand for a 10% increase for these low-paid workers, which would amount to an average rise of only R30 a month. Shoprite's lowest paid workers receive as little as R900. The retail sector has, according to the latest survey on directors' fees carried out by Labour Research Services (LRS), the highest gap between the top and bottom paid, reflecting the combined effect of the exceptionally high packages paid to the chief executives in this sector, at an average of R18 million, and the exceptionally low average minimum wage of just more than R19 000 a year in the sector.

· Contract cleaners in rural areas earn R1099 a month; in urban areas it rises to R1371. Yet the National Contract Cleaners' Association dismisses the unions' demand for increases on these paltry wages, of 12.25% in urban areas and 15.25% in rural areas as "impossibly unrealistic" and is offering 6%, which is hardly above the level of inflation.

According to the LRS survey, the average increase in minimum wages during 2005 was R150 a month compared with the average increase in pay to executive directors of R50 000 a month. The LRS calculated that the average remuneration for a chief executive was R7 million, excluding gains from share options. The average minimum wage for a blue-collar worker was R25 000.

On average "a worker will have to work 183 years to earn what an executive director earns in a year and 270 years to earn what a chief executive earns in a year".

In this context, COSATU warmly welcomes President Thabo Mbeki's Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture, in which he took up a theme articulated many times by COSATU. He deplored the growing tendency to pursue "personal enrichment at all costs" and "the deification of personal wealth as the distinguishing feature of the new citizen of the new South Africa".

He contrasted this with the principles of "social cohesion and mutually beneficial human solidarity", and shared the concern expressed by George Soros at the rise of "market fundamentalism and the dominance and precedence of the capitalist motive of private profit maximisation".

COSATU could not agree more, and surely the President would agree that the employers, such as those mentioned above, are prime examples of this selfish "get rich" mentality. They make huge profits from exploiting the labour of their workers, award themselves massive salaries and bonuses, and yet expect their workers to struggle to survive on poverty wages.

As a result we now live in what is officially the most unequal society on earth.

As the COSATU Congress Discussion Paper says: "The rising level of inequality can be seen in the decline in workers' share in the national income between 1994 and 2002, while the share of profits increased.

"According to the Labour Force Survey figures, 17% of all officially employed people in South Africa earn less than R500 a month, 34% earn under R1000 a month and a total of 60% of all workers earn less than R2500 a month. An income of R2500 per month between five (two parents, two children, and a grandparent) translates into an income of about R30 a day per person. Access to employment is therefore in itself not a ladder out of poverty. The millions of workers who earn below subsistence level remain trapped in poverty and desperation."

The workers of South Africa embody the values which the president wants to defend - solidarity and mutual support. We should therefore rally behind the strikers who are trying to begin to narrow the vast gulf between the poorest and richest in our nation by negotiating for modest increases in the real living standards of the lowest paid. They are not pursuing the selfish goals of their employers but fighting for the principles of what the President defines as "social cohesion, human solidarity and national reconciliation", and deserve the support of the nation.

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