COSATU+GS+Z+Vavi+to+NEHAWU+National+Bargaining+Conference



=Address of the COSATU General Secretary to the NEHAWU National Bargaining Conference- 18 – 20 August 2006=


 * //19 August 2006, Zwelinzima Vavi//**

Comrade office bearers of NEHAWU, shop stewards and activists,

Let me first express my gratitude for the chance to speak at your National Bargaining Conference.

In our country we have created a blend of trade unions in a movement that is based on three pillars as its core business: Firstly we seek to use the unity and strength gained from greater numbers to improve the working conditions of members and to continuously improve their wages.

Secondly we are seeking to use that strength to defend the jobs of our members and fight for social and economic policies that will defend members’ and workers’ pay and living standards.

Thirdly we seek to use this strength to represent workers’ broad political interests. We know very well that it is pointless to fight for improved pay if that pay will be eroded by, for example, transport costs.

We are engaged in a total struggle for emancipation and transformation. We are a transformative and revolutionary trade union movement. We know that change must happen fast and must be touch all aspects of our lives. We are no narrow ‘gumboots’ union. We shall continue to resist attempts to confine our role to the workplace. We shall play all these roles because to us they are one struggle. We are NEHAWU at the forefront of the struggle to transform our society, with workers’ interests a key factor to measure societal progress and achievements.

Our growth and strength is determined by our ability to use collective action to achieve these ends.

As we have learned through the difficult struggles of the past twelve years, collective bargaining poses particular challenges in the public service. On the one hand we must help drive transformation. On the other we cannot accept that ordinary public servants must bear an unfair share of the costs arising out of transformation.

We must be in the forefront of //batho pele// and all efforts to maintain the spirit of ama-volunteer, which is at the heart of our values of selflessness. Yet we can’t afford, and can never accept, retrenchments, outsourcing, casualisation or a wage freeze in the name of transformation.

At all times we balance our role as a trade union, that must uncompromisingly defend members’ interests, but at the same time a trade union that is also part of the revolutionary forces seeking overall change for the betterment of the lives of working class and our people as the whole.

Balancing this is no easy matter. On the 26 April 2006 I came to address your service delivery conference whose task was to look at how, whilst we should struggle to defend members’ interests, we at the same time champion the need to improve service delivery to our people, in particular the working class and the poor whom we mainly serve.

A second challenge lies in the fact that across the public service there are too many unions, many of them COSATU affiliates, who have to negotiate with a single employer. This is a weakness, not a strength. Trade union pluralism, or so-called ‘trade union democracy’ in the name of the freedom of association, comes at a very high price to workers and their interests.

Coordinating and managing the contradictions that sometimes arise out of these countless mandating structures is a nightmare that all of us must struggle to overcome soon. We have employed a comrade to coordinate this work full-time. But the long-term solution lies in the creation of a cartel and one super union. Our main strength is unity not in countless logos and colours.


 * Comrades,**

As we meet here, we are in the run-up to COSATU’s Ninth National Congress. That Congress will assess our progress toward our 2015 Plan, which we adopted three years ago. As you deliberate here, you should also ask how your demands can help take forward our broader strategy of building working-class power and creating quality jobs.

I don’t want to give dignity to mad media frenzy about leadership squabbles and divisions in the run-up to this very important Ninth National Congress. COSATU has 1.8 million members. We would be concerned if those members through their unions were to no longer agree about the strategic direction the federation must take and the role it should play. Our responsibility as the leadership is to preserve that unity and to defend our cohesion.

We should not therefore be overly and unduly concerned about a handful of sources that go to the media to twist and misrepresent facts in order to launch character assassination campaigns against targeted individuals. I am not engaging with this media frenzy because I have come to be convinced that if I do I will not be able to finish the report that we must present to congress. One of the many messages I received in the past week was from a member of the Chris Hani Brigade, comrade Mkhawuleli Maleki. This comrade warned me not to wrestle with the pig in the mud - because the pig enjoys that.

Let me assure you, comrades that COSATU is united, strong, vibrant, and independent, focused on the matters that you will be addressing in this conference. The faceless forces, who, for the past year or so, have been presenting us as being divided, do so with the hope of undermining our unity and cohesion. They shall not succeed. Clearly the unity and cohesion of COSATU is the biggest threat to capital and its stewards even within our liberation movement.

Those forces will forever work to undermine the organised workers’ strength and power. Let us again repeat this - they shall not succeed!

The COSATU of Elijah Barayi does not belong to any individual - none of us are bigger than this giant federation. We shall go to that congress and simply ignore the media frenzy, and their sources, and come out from it even more united and more focused than before to confront challenges facing working class.

We shall not be distracted. For the sake of the memory of Looksmart Ngudle and Vuyisile Mini, through whose names and memories we are reminded of the supreme sacrifices made by thousands of trade unionists, we shall continue to build COSATU as a movement of the proletariat. While it will continue to be in the Alliance it will jealously fight for its independence and defend the right of its members to think and to have views on matters affecting them and this society.

We will never let these anonymous, lying forces divide the working class. Nor will we let them deter us from honest, open and robust debate, including an honest assessment of our leader’s performance as we prepare to elect new leaders in the congress. We will make the Ninth National Congress a strategic success, which will reaffirm COSATU’s internal democracy and strengthen our ability to defend the working class and give workers a voice in the workplace and in policy debates.


 * Comrades,**

Many lessons can be learnt from previous bargaining rounds. In particular, we need to ask:


 * Has the workers’ economic position improved overall in the past 12 years because of our efforts?
 * Have we managed to close the apartheid wage gap?
 * Have we ensured that workers have adequate career paths?
 * Have we secured gains in collective bargaining that will support improved service to the public?

This is what your bargaining conference must engage with. Overall there have been some improvements, in particular for the workers in the lowers rungs, who saw substantial increases in particular in the first few years of democracy.

But progress has been slow and hard. We have not managed to ensure equal pay for work of equal value, overcoming the inequalities inherited from apartheid. Moreover, middle-level workers – teachers, nurses and police in particular – have seen only very slight improvements in the past ten years. And the majority of workers still do not have adequate career-pathing. If you start as a cleaner in the public service, the chances are you will remain a cleaner your entire career.

A related concern remains the question of skills development for public servants. The fact is that the SETAs have not delivered, including in the public service.

We need to ask whether we have succeeded in articulating demands around career paths and skills development, and mobilising our members to fight for those demands. Too often we end up negotiating percentage increases, when we need transformation of the hierarchical and oppressive systems established under apartheid. The need to change the highly hierarchical culture is important, just as it is important to resist the move to more managerialism.

We expect the public sector to be the shining example of how unions should work with management. There should not be antagonistic relationship between NEHAWU and the public sector’s political leadership, who for their entire lives led the struggle against the values imposed by the apartheid system which we seek to change.

Over the past twelve years cadres of this liberation movement, including our own former leaders in the unions, were deployed in strategic positions as new managers. With this advantage we should have seen a transformation of the relationship and the creation of a new partnership that the unions in the private sector would seek to emulate.

Partnership between revolutionaries should not mean transforming unions into sweethearts. No – no! We need to maintain NEHAWU as a militant union that is independent. When I was on a provincial visit to the North West province sometime last year I was taken aback to note that the relationship between NEHAWU’s current members and former members now in positions of authority in the hospitals was in some cases worse than the relationship the NUM has with white racist mine managers.

For the past two weeks, again in the same North West Province, in Rustenburg, NEHAWU has been leading struggles to resist a very anti-worker and problematic management style of yet another black manager. I believe that this matter needs conscious efforts to address.

The continued departure of nurses into the private sector or overseas reflects the dire need to improve wages, working conditions and management in the public service. Nurses start with a salary of around R5000 a month – about the same as a skilled factory worker. There has been no genuine effort to ensure a review, and implementation, of a career path for nurses, leaving them with little or no prospects of promotion.

Chris Hani Baragwanath shows the results. According to research done by Naledi together with NEHAWU, there is an overall staff shortage of 32% at the hospital, which is the largest in the southern hemisphere. Research done by Health Systems Trust indicates a shortage of 27% of health professionals which translates into 46 000 vacancies in the health sector alone.

That translates into a huge burden on the shoulders of the remaining health professionals that you represent. This matter will form a key demand of the Jobs and Poverty Campaign that we will take up after the COSATU Ninth National Congress.

In addition, we have to evaluate our progress in implementing the agreements reached at the Public Service Jobs Summit in 2000. Have we used those agreements effectively to ensure improvements in services for our people, combined with higher employment levels? In recent years, government has committed itself to growing the public service, especially in the big professions. Can we honestly say that the public-service unions have kept them to that promise?

A further concern arises around the wage gap. You know that the worst paid public servants still earn only about R2500 a month. In contrast, this year Parliamentarians are looking forward to an increase of almost 6% on monthly pay of about R35 000. The proposed increase would equal some R2000 a month, which is more than two weeks’ pay for a level-one worker. The salary of a DG is in the region of R700 000 a year or about R58 000 monthly or R1944 a day.

People at the top seem easily to lose track of the reality of low pay for most workers. The democratic system has effectively maintained the massive wage gaps left from apartheid. Rather than questioning the overpayment at the top that typified apartheid, we have taken it over wholesale.

This conference will make an assessment of all these issues and decide the way forward. If you decide that you want to have a major fight with the employers on some of these issues then you must decide that early. It makes no sense to repeat to make the same mistake over and over again. We can’t just react to employers’ provocation or intransigence, as if we did not know beforehand that the negotiations would require serious mass backing.

At the strategic level we must if the conditions demand so indicate upfront that there will be a strike, unless tremendous progress is made. Members must know that soon, so that psychologically they are prepared. Readiness for a serious fight means that we must also prepare. It means tackling the inhibiting nature of the minimum service agreements that have disqualified far too many workers in the public service from exercising their right to strike.

It also means that organisationally and financially we must be ready. At this conference you will have to confront these questions based on the assessment you must make of the gains and setbacks of the previous negotiations round. Serious battles are never won in the boardrooms.

The NEHAWU I know will confront these challenges and at the end it will come out on top. On behalf of the National Office Bearers and all our members I wish you a very successful bargaining conference.


 * Amandla!**


 * Patrick Craven (National Spokesperson), 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/ 086 603 9667**
 * Cell: 0828217456**
 * E-Mail: patrick@cosatu.org.za**

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