2005-11-06,+Vavi+speeches,+PAWE-MUSA,+Vuyisile+Mini+and+SACTU

4 November 2005
The Minister of Arts and Culture Dr. Pallo Jordan,

MEC for Arts and Culture in Gauteng, Barbara Creecy,

CEO of SABC Dali Mpofu,

Comrades and friends,

COSATU is honoured to have been invited to speak to this ground breaking event in the history of the workers in the cultural industry.

The Freedom Charter proclaims that:

“The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life.

“All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands.”

In this meeting here today are all those who have made a choice to participate in the activities of life through dedicating themselves with their talents, skills and resources to the execution of this mandate.

Among us here today are those who use the potency of a printed page, the art and might of the written and spoken word, allowing us to draw on the observations and experiences of others, transcending the limitations imposed by time and space.

Through the tools of the sculptor, the hues and brushes of the painter, the words of the writer, the drumbeat, the piano, the trumpet, theatre, the sweet and melodic voices and in films, they uplift our spirit, entertain and stimulate our minds, excite our critical thought and allow us to use and turn the information they provided into insight - to turn possibilities into reality.

Through their intervention we develop the words, the metaphors, symbols, allusions and other verbal associations with which we not only interpret the world but shape and change it.

It is these ingenious creators of beauty, the humble people of our country, the creative workers of our land in the cultural industry who enhance our country’s identity and distinctiveness, who have put themselves to the service of the nation so that they can help in the enhancement of our cultural life”.

It is through the planned development and expansion of the cultural industry with the support and contribution from all of us that we can measure whether the cultural treasures of mankind have indeed been opened to all.

We wish to acknowledge and appreciate the work done by the ministry in the Department of Arts and Culture through progressive policies and legislation. This has allowed for the creation of structures to realise the dream reflected in the Freedom Charter and the RDP, which gives a task to “ensure that resources and facilities for both the production and the appreciation of arts and culture are made available and accessible to all”.

We appreciate that government has worked to ensure our industry is treated with the seriousness it deserves, both as a critical element in national development and social integration and mobilisation, and as a potential source of employment for thousands of workers.

As we noted in our input to the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative, cultural activities formed a central part of the massive public works programme in the U.S. in the Great Depression. We need to learn from this experience. This type of programme can give our youth and our communities new hope and vision while providing them with a basic income.

There are still many challenges in our industry. They are not new, but are known almost by all present here today.

The ministry of arts and culture alone cannot resolve them but requires our collective effort. They include the following.

The cultural industry is still largely dominated by a few big businesses, which are increasingly foreign owned. This results in unfair contracts for the artists, resulting in exploitative and unfair labour relations.

In this context, the labour laws do not adequately define the status of cultural workers, so that many do not enjoy sufficient protection under the law.

The media prefers to rely heavily on cheap, poor-quality foreign products, rather than developing our local production. That means they undermine employment in South Africa, as well as projecting an entirely euro-centric image that misleads our people. In any case, film, television and advertising are still heavily dominated by white men, especially in higher-level positions.

The cultural industry is by its very nature information rich and therefore requires that those working in this industry have their interests protected by legislation. We must still ensure our copyright legislation is equal to the task.

Many historically black schools still have no capacity or facilities for cultural studies. This shuts an important door to personal development for thousands of our youth, as well as denying them important skills for employment.

Moreover, most of our communities still do not have cultural centres where our people can have access to materials, facilities, training and venues. The cultural industry remains largely concentrated in a few metro areas, although it draws on people and traditions from across our country.

Most of what has been raised here is not new. Government itself has conducted studies and made recommendations to deal with these issues. But we still need to see implementation, which must largely be driven by the stakeholders themselves.

Cultural industries form a national priority under government’s Programme of Action. We still need to see institutions that can implement this, however. Within government, we need an inter-governmental task team that can drive the process. Moreover, we need a sector strategy process that can involve key stakeholders, such as a BEE Charter or a Sector Summit.

We call on the private sector to work together with cultural workers to develop this into a real industry where workers are defined as workers and enjoy all the rights enjoyed by other workers in other industries.

Above all, cultural workers themselves must know that unless they are organised and speak with one voice, unless they begin to see themselves as workers facing common challenges, unless they realise the urgency to unite, they will remain objects and commodities used only to generate wealth for others.

Today we have come to be the witnesses to the birth of a new giant in the industry, one that can take up the tasks and challenges facing the industry. We celebrate this together with our comrades from government, who have shown their willingness to support transformation. We are particularly heartened by the recent meetings with the Minister on this topic.

For us as COSATU, the unity of PAWE and MUSA represents a step forward toward the unity of the working class. This sets an example for other industries

The leadership of the two organisations has come to the conclusion that the continued division of the unions in the sector can only encourage the continued exploitation of creative workers. Only through unity can workers use the force and authority presented by their numbers to influence employers and to transform the industry.

When we go to Durban on December 1 for COSATU’s 20th anniversary, we will go there proud that we have put into practice COSATU’s long-standing demand for one industry, one union!

Comrades and friends,

Let me again wish you all success in your discussions today.

Zwelinzima Vavi, COSATU General Secretary, address on the occasion to mark the 41 anniversary of the execution of Vuyisile Mini - Port Elizabeth, 6 November 2005
I am tremendously honoured to be given the privilege of speaking at this moving and significant event – laying a wreath in memory of one of the greatest heroes and martyrs of the South African trade union and liberation movements, Vuyisile Mini.

As we celebrate COSATU’s 20th anniversary, it would be unforgivable for us not to remember those comrades like Comrade Vuyisile, who laid the foundations of our unions, our federation and our freedom. We treasure especially those who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for the liberation of future generations. Were it not for the contribution these thousands of comrades made we might still be living in the chains of apartheid and slavery to this day.

His dedication to the struggle was total. As the leader of the South African Congress of Trade Unions here in Port Elizabeth and Secretary of the ANC’s Cape Region, his entire adult life was spent in the service of our people.

We owe a huge debt to these great comrades and the best way to begin to repay that debt is to learn from their example and continue the struggle that they fought and died for.

As Solomon Mahlangu put it, their blood nourished the tree of freedom. It that tree whose sweet fruits have led to millions of our people celebrating access to clean water, electricity, houses, education, health, social protections such as children’s grants and many more.

We won great victories, especially the breakthrough of 1994, which led to the death of apartheid, a democratic constitution, protection of human rights and labour laws that shield workers from some of the worst forms of exploitation by the bosses.

If however Vuyisile Mini were to come back to us today and see the suffering being felt by all those workers who have been retrenched and whose families have been consigned to a life of hunger, he would surely be joining and leading COSATU’s struggle against mass unemployment and poverty. He would have been in the forefront of the marches that have been moving from this hall to the town to demand an end to unemployment and poverty.

That campaign so far has been phenomenal. Every Monday in October, we saw wave after wave of workers, in province after province, leaving their jobs and taking to the streets. And our action won the support of millions of people outside our movement – within the poor communities, the churches and civil society.

The reason for such a high level of support is not hard to discover. People know from their own experience the truth of what COSATU keep saying: That while the workers and the poor have made major advances on the political front since 1994, it is white big business and the rich who have gained most ground in the trenches of the economic battlefield.

The business media keep proclaiming that we are enjoying a boom. Economic growth is up. Profits and executive salaries keep breaking new records. But the share of workers’ pay in the national income has actually dropped since 1994, from 57% to 52%, while the share of profits has risen from 26% to 31%. The share of workers earning under R1000 has remained virtually unchanged since 1995, while the value of R1000 dropped by over half!

At the same time, major industries, particularly mining and manufacturing, continue to shed thousands of jobs. Not only does this plunge the workers themselves into poverty, but millions more - between six to eight family members who depend on each worker’s income – also face hunger and misery. They suddenly find there is no money for housing, school fees, or medical care, even to put food on the table.

Although some statistics suggest that employment has been growing, the rate is not nearly enough to absorb new entrants into the labour market. Between 1997 and 2002, some five million people joined the labour force, while the economy created just over a million jobs.

And most of these new jobs are poorly paid and insecure and more and more existing jobs are becoming casual, temporary and low paid, as employers outsource employment to labour brokers. These parasites make fat profits from helping business to cut their costs and get around their legal obligations under the labour laws.

These casualised jobs offer poverty pay, no security, and no chance of promotion or a career. In the worst cases, farm workers are still being flung out of their houses when they lose their jobs. And all too often still, workers are discriminated against and abused by racist employers who think they can still get away with what they did in the years of apartheid.

Even when workers are not actually retrenched, all too often they feel forced to accept worse conditions, longer shifts or lower pay just to keep their jobs. Others have to accept being contracted out to labour brokers as the only alternative, or may be forced into becoming ‘independent contractors’ and lose all their job security and rights as employees.

Yet these very same employers who are dodging their responsibilities to their workers have the cheek to keep whinging that the labour laws make it too hard to dismiss workers and that collective bargaining imposes too many constraints on their economic freedom. What nonsense!

Surely the recent loss of thousands of jobs, especially the bloodbath in clothing and gold mining and near-extinction of the footwear industry, explodes the argument for relaxing the labour laws. On the contrary the laws need tightening, so that after three months working for the same employer, all employees enjoy all the rights and benefits of permanent staff.

The scandalous court judgement in the NUMSA v Frys Metals case demonstrated clearly that at present there is no law that prevents employers from retrenching workers in order to increase their profits. The courts ruled that employers can still get rid of workers very easily, for ‘operational reasons’, provided only that they follow the correct procedures, provide adequate information to workers and consult them on alternatives.

High unemployment is a national emergency. COSATU demands that business and government stop acting as if everything in the garden is lovely so we can just let business continue as usual. They must take serious measure to create jobs and improve the lives of workers and the poor.

Retrenchments must be last resort. Government and business must do far more to encourage sustainable job-creating industries in the medium to long term. In the short run, we want greater government intervention to prevent job losses, stronger legislation to encourage employers to look at alternatives to retrenchment, and better support mechanisms for workers who are retrenched.

We have to find solutions to the crisis of jobs and poverty! We demand action to create new jobs for all our people, to end racism and exploitation in the workplace, and to ensure access to services in our communities.

But it is all very well to make speeches about the problems workers face. I am sure that Vuyisile Mini would insist that we also organise and mobilise our forces to fight back. That is why the other wings of COSATU’s campaign are so important – to listen to what our members are saying and recruit the millions of workers still outside our ranks into the trade unions.

The Jobs and Poverty Campaign must come down to the workplaces and communities. We must target companies that are violating workers rights and take them on, not once or twice a year, but every day.

Our locals and affiliates are drawing up a blacklist of COSATU’s worst enemies in each town. It will list firms that retrench workers, that use casualised and temporary staff, and that discriminate against workers on the basis of colour, sex, disability or HIV status and farmers who abuse their workers and deny them basic freedoms.

We must maintain our Living Wage Campaign. This year thousands of workers occupied the streets to demand a living wage and to fight to overcome the apartheid wage gap. Many unions in the process scored many victories.

The Recruitment Campaign we launched in February is beginning to show results, but we have not met the ambitious targets we set ourselves. We must do more to get every shop steward, organiser and activist to step up their efforts to organise the unorganised.

We must overcome our inability to sustain such our campaigns over long periods, with a long-term campaign on the ground. We must address this mistake.

Lastly we are mobilising workers everywhere, particularly in KwaZulu Natal, to attend COSATU’s 20th anniversary mass rally on 4 December at the ABSA stadium in Durban, the very spot where COSATU was launched on 1 December 1985.

The stadium holds 65 000 and we are determined to fill it to capacity. I appeal to all of you here today to come along and bring your fellow workers, families and friends with you to enjoy a great historic day.

One of Vuyisile Mini’s favourite songs was "//Mayihambe le vangeli// //Mayigqib ilizwe lonke//" ("Let this gospel spread and be known through the world"). Let us honour his memory today by spreading the gospel of COSATU, national liberation and socialism to wider and wider lays of the working class and the poor.

Vuyisile Mini – no matter where you are and what you are going through – you are a hero

Amandla – ngawethu

Thank you

COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi’s, Address at the Dinner in Honour of SACTU and Vuyisile Mini
Port Elizabeth 5 November 2005

Members of the COSATU Central Executive Committee

Provincial leadership and COSATU activists in the Eastern Cape Province

ANC and SACP national and provincial leaders

Mayor of the Nelson Mandela metro – Nceba Faku

Family of martyrs Vuyisile Mini, Wilson Khanyinga and Zinakile Mkaba

I warmly welcome this opportunity to pay tribute to Vuyisile Mini, one of the greatest and finest sons of the Eastern Cape and the trade union movement, a freedom fighter whose impact on millions of his and later generations has still to be properly acknowledged.

This dinner dedicated to his memory and, through him, to all other SACTU activists in this province and elsewhere is a small token of appreciation to their gallant and unforgettable contributions not only to the trade union movement but to the liberation struggle as whole.

We are delight to see some of these cadres at this dinner, and we want to inform them that their sacrifices - and we know many such as Vuyisile Mini paid the ultimate price - laid a firm foundation that ensured that today we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the giant COSATU.

It is their contribution that ensured that today we are hosted here by a Mayor who is leading a democratically elected local government. We thank you honourable Mayor for hosting us tonight. Your gesture is extremely symbolic. On the 41st anniversary of the brutal execution of Vuyisile Mini we return to the region that produced him, not to mourn but to celebrate his life with a mayor we claim as our own. Thank you once more to the Mayor and his office.

Throughout this, our 20th anniversary year, we have been remembering the heroes and heroines who built our movement and fought for our liberation. We have already honoured Elijah Barayi, Moses Kotane, JB Marks and shall be marking the contribution of Dora Tamana, Stephen Dlamini and Ray Alexander.

Tonight and tomorrow we turn the spotlight on Vuyisile Mini - a workers’ and freedom struggle martyr, a Secretary of both the Dock Workers` Union and the Sheet Metal Workers` Union, an Executive Member and Organizer of the Port Elizabeth Local Committee of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the Secretary of the ANC’s Cape region, a soldier of the peoples army, Umkhonto we sizwe!

By a happy coincidence COSATU’s 20th anniversary coincided with SACTU’s fiftieth. It is timely therefore to reflect on the lessons we can learn from this mighty organisation in which Vuyisile played such a leading role.

SACTU was formed on 5 March 1955 at an Inaugural Conference in Johannesburg. I am happy to inform you that on 5 March this year we held a conference to celebrate ten years of our freedom, which we also dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of SACTU.

The creation of SACTU constituted a first attempt by the working people to build a giant non-racial trade union coordinating body, fighting for the common class interests of workers of all races, all sexes and all colours.

Like COSATU later, SACTU never confined itself to workplace issues but was involved in the political struggle against the national oppression of all Black people in South Africa - Africans, Indians and Coloureds. SACTU’s founding Declaration of Principles is just as relevant today as then.

“History,” it declared, “has shown that unorganised workers are unable to improve their wages and conditions of work on a lasting basis. Only where workers have organised in effective trade unions have they been able to improve their lot, raise their standard of living and generally protect themselves and their families against the insecurities of life.

“… Just as the individual worker, or any group of workers, are unable to improve their lot without organisation into Trade Unions, so is the individual trade union powerless unless there is in existence a coordinating body of trade unions which unites the efforts of all workers. For such a trade union federation to be successful, it must be able to speak on behalf of all workers, irrespective of race or colour, nationality or sex.

“The future of the people of South Africa is in the hands of its workers. Only the working class, in alliance with other progressive minded sections of the community, can build a happy life for all South Africans, a life free from unemployment, insecurity and poverty, free from racial hatred and oppression, a life of vast opportunities for all people.

“… We resolve that this coordinating body of trade unions shall strive to unite all workers in its ranks, without discrimination, and without prejudice. We resolve that this body shall determinedly seek to further and protect the interests of all workers, and that its guiding motto shall be the universal slogan of working class solidarity: - 'An injury to one is an injury to all!'

SACTU’s birth saw the trade unions play a decisive role in the growing mass resistance movement of the time. It joined the ANC and the Congress of Democrats to write the Freedom Charter which was adopted at the Kliptown Congress of the People in July of the same year SACTU was born.

Union leaders were in the vanguard of the struggles against forced removals, passes and Bantu education. They led bus boycotts and demonstrations against repression. Of the 156 freedom fighters charged in the Treason Trial of 1956, 24 were SACTU leaders, including its President, General Secretary and six NEC members.

It is because of the foundations laid by SACTU that today we have all-round cadres who understand the relationship between workplace struggles and broader struggles for social transformation. Unionists fought oppression in the workplace, led street committees and community organisations for better houses, swelled the ranks of Umkhonto We Sizwe and formed the backbone of the ANC and the SACP structures.

Today at least two of the six ANC National Office Bearers are products of workers’ struggles. Countless are in the current NEC. They lead government departments as Ministers and senior bureaucrats. They lead local government. There are too many to mention.

We speak here of JB Marks, Moses Mabhida, Harry Gwala, Oscar Mpetha, Moses Kotane, Ray Alexander, Rita Ndzanga, Johannes Nkosi, Vuyisile Mini, Liz Abrahams, Wilton Mkwayi, Raymond Mhlaba.

SACTU membership grew from 20 000 in 19 unions in 1956 to 53 000 in 51 unions in 1961. That is why the state was forced to crack down. This was at a time when black workers were not regarded as workers. In fact it was only in 1969 that the racist regime recognised Coloured workers as workers and only in 1979 did it recognise African workers as workers. The regime refused to register or recognize unions. Wages were dictated by state wage boards, some of which actually lowered minimum wages for their industry, forcing SACTU to launch a national campaign for a minimum of one pound a day, a forerunner to COSATU’s 1987 Living Wage Campaign.

The apartheid government made strikes illegal. SACTU leaders were arrested, detained and banned. Some died in detention. Others were forced into exile.

Then, in November 1964 Vuyisile Mini was hanged, along with Wilson Khayinga and Zinakile Mkaba, on trumped-up charges of committing acts of sabotage and complicity in the death of a police informer.

The reality is of course that these martyrs were killed because they had dedicated their lives to the liberation struggle and posed a mortal threat to the apartheid state and their capitalist cohorts.

That is why, as workers celebrate their successes and achievements today, we must never forget the huge debt we owe to Vuyusile Mini and thousands of others who fought and died for the freedoms we now enjoy.

Tomorrow at the rally at the Great Centenary hall in New Brighton, I shall say more about the lessons for today we can learn from these past struggles. But I can say with confidence that Comrade Vuyisile would be insisting, if he were still with us, that we study the past not for reasons of nostalgia or sentiment, but in order to organise better today and bring nearer the completion of our national democratic revolution.

Like us he would have applauded the democratic gains we have made since 1994. But he would surely also agree with COSATU that a society in which 40% of the workforce are unemployed and more than 20 million of our people live in poverty is not the kind of society that our struggle pioneers fought and died for.

The best way by far to commemorate our struggle heroes is to take up the fight they began and see it through to a conclusion, to a South Africa in which power really is on the hands of the people, and all the evils of racism, exploitation, poverty and inequality are banished to the past.

Forward to socialism

Paul Notyhawa (Spokesperson), Congress of South African Trade Unions

1-5 Leyds Cnr Biccard Streets, Braamfontein, 2017

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

Cell: 082 4911 591

Tel: +27 11 339-4911/24

Fax: +27 11 339-5080/6940

E-Mail: paul@cosatu.org.za