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COSATU May Day message 2007: May Day is Workers’ Day! 26 April 2007
Every year, throughout the world, workers and their communities come together on 1 May to demonstrate their solidarity and support for socialism.
The date commemorates the historic struggle of working people, and is recognized in every country except the United States and Canada, despite that being where it has its origins - in the fight for an eight-hour working day in the 1880s.
In 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labour Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day's work from and after 1 May 1886. Support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly among workers, who were forced to work as long as fourteen hours a day. By April 1886, 250,000 workers were involved and on 1 May 1886, there were national strikes in the United States and Canada.
In Chicago police attacked striking workers and killed six. The next day, at a demonstration in Haymarket Square to protest against the police brutality, a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of police, killing eight of them.
The police arrested eight anarchist trade unionists, claiming they threw the bomb. To this day it is still controversial as to whether the bomb was thrown by the workers at the police or dropped by police agents provocateurs. But the State of Illinois needed scapegoats. They tried four of the workers - Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer, found them guilty and executed them.
In 1889 the International Working Men's Association declared 1 May an international working class holiday in commemoration of these Haymarket Martyrs.
In 1904, the International Socialist Conference called on "all Social-Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." As the most effective way of demonstrating was by striking, the congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organisations of all countries to stop work on 1 May wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."
In the dark days of apartheid, South African workers proudly adopted 1 May as their day, and staged some of their biggest stayaways and demonstrations to support the demand for it to be a public holiday. These played a major part in bringing down the old regime and winning the democratic rights we enjoy today. In 1994 the ANC government declared it an official national holiday. That is why it is a day to be treasured and must never be lost.
We are concerned that the bosses are slowly claiming back May Day, our Freedom Day, Women Day and Human Rights Day as theirs. They are making most of us work. Some of them even refuse to pay workers double time or giving them a day off in lieu of working on a public day. At the COSATU Congress we agreed that these four days must be declared non-tradable public holidays. No employers must be allowed to open their shops on these historic days.
We are celebrating the 2007 May Day under the theme “Create quality jobs; stop poverty and inequalities now!” plus the following sub themes:
This May Day we shall be intensifying the Jobs and Poverty Campaign, which began in 1999 in response to rising levels of unemployment. We need it more than ever today. Although we keep reading that the economy is booming and we are all getting richer, it is certainly not booming for millions of working people, their families and communities. Despite major improvements in the lives of all South Africans, the first 13 years of our democracy has seen far more benefits going to white business and the rich minority than to workers and the poor majority.
South Africa is experiencing a period of sustained positive economic growth, but as workers we are still to benefit from this growth. Profits are soaring on the back of high levels of productivity, combined with unprecedented, astronomically high pay packages for senior management.
Democracy has also opened up opportunities for upward mobility for the black middle strata, including the opportunity to amass wealth and accumulate commodities. The levels of conspicuous consumption have rapidly increased for the few. We are told that we have turned a corner and entered a so-called ‘age of hope’. Indeed this is an age of hope for the bosses. Consider the following facts from the Executive Pay in South Africa book written by Ann Crotty and Renee Bonorchis:
Contrast the picture of the South African economy punted by the mainstream media with the reality confronted by millions of poor South Africans. Unemployment remains stubbornly high at just below 40%. This means 8 million South African able and looking for work cannot find opportunities. Of the unemployed over 70% are under 35 – mostly African women. Rural areas fare worse in comparison to urban areas.
The quality of jobs is also declining, as precarious and vulnerable forms of employment are rapidly replacing permanent secure employment.
The rising level of inequality can be seen in the fact that the workers’ share in the national income has declined since 1994 while the share of profits has increased. This has important implications for our development path, as it is indicative of the lower levels of labour absorption and the stagnation of their wages.
According to the Labour Force Survey figures, 16.7% of all officially employed people in South Africa earn less than R500 a month, 34.3% earn under R1000 a month and a total of 54% of all workers earn less than R2500 a month.
Poverty has at best stabilised, but remains high and it is estimated that 40%-50% of the population live in poverty. There is a debate on whether poverty has decreased. As the Peoples’ Budget Campaign has concluded, after reviewing many studies, the probability is that poverty has increased between 1996 and 2001 with the situation getting marginally better since 2002.
In short, the post-apartheid socio-economic order could be characterised as one in which there is positive economic growth and opportunities for amassing wealth for a limited few. This growth is not equitably shared. Fundamentally the accumulation regime has not changed; hence development and under-development continue to coexist. Cheap labour is reproduced under different circumstance, including through sub-contracting and increased use of women labour, and through exploitation of undocumented migrant workers, especially Zimbabweans.
The 500 000 jobs a year that are now being created represent modest progress, but they are nowhere near enough to offset the massive destruction of jobs in the first decade of our democracy or to achieve even the modest objective of halving unemployment and poverty by 2014. Even if joblessness fell by half, one in five working people would still be unable to find paid work.
The crisis of joblessness also affects public-sector workers, who still face overwork, crumbling workplaces, and a lack of materials like medicine and textbooks. Doctors and nurses, as well as other health workers, face huge workloads.
Government is not replacing workers who leave the public service fast enough, but is following the immoral example set by the private sector managers. Thousands of teachers’ and health workers’ jobs have been casualised. Then without any adequate consultation government they retrench these temporary educators at no cost. 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. The unions are absolutely right to demand a 12% increase to bring their low-paid members a little closer to a decent living wage and narrow the massive apartheid wealth gap.
Since 1999, through strikes and other protest actions, we have made all South Africans aware of the crisis. Recent statements by the President, ministers and ANC indicate that they now regard unemployment and poverty as the principal challenge our country is facing. But words must be turned into deeds.
We are calling for a change in the country’s economic policies. The current policies have spectacularly failed to break the backbone of unemployment and poverty. Instead we are seeing growing inequalities. The rich are getting richer and the poor are not seeing fast enough change in their economic situation. The status quo is no good for workers and the poor. We demand a change!
We require strong, interventionist policies to ensure that the second decade of democracy belongs to workers and the poor. It is easy to make declarations, but far more challenging to pursue economic, industrial and social policies and advance the all the goals of national democratic revolution.
COSATU will be striving to ensure that policies to shift the balance of wealth and power in favour of the working class and the poor are adopted by the ANC at their policy and national conferences this year.
We did not struggle for freedom all those years just to hand over wealth and power to the capitalists. We fought for a fundamental transformation of the economy and a massive redistribution of wealth and power in favour of workers and the poor. And that is what we shall be campaigning for the ANC to adopt as the cornerstone of its policy at its conference in June.
Moreover workers did not lead the struggle to end oppression and exploitation only to be told at this stage that we must embrace the ideology of the bosses and capitalism. We are proud socialists and we are proud ANC members. We call on the leadership of the ANC to resist the temptation to push the liberation struggle to embrace an ideological line that favours the bosses instead of workers and the poor. We are workers and we hate capitalism. None of the problems we are raising this May Day can be addressed by that bosses’ economic system.
We call on workers and poor communities to discuss the ANC draft policy papers and ensure that their interests are adequately protected. It would be sad if workers were to be intimidated by complicated English and the use of Marxist jargon to disguise diversions from an NDR that is biased towards workers and the poor. We must not sign off our future to intellectuals who want to drive the NDR in the opposite direction. Do not hand over the ANC to capitalists whose objective has always been to turn it into their organisation.
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. We need to mobilise for decent work and an end to poverty and fight to ensure that shared growth becomes a reality.
In line with COSATU’s commitment to worker-control and democracy, we have sent a questionnaire to our members to find out what particular grievances they want the campaign to take up and these will be incorporated into our programme. We can be sure however that they will include COSATU’s long-standing demands for:
We salute the close to 1 million farm workers who continue to endure the worst forms of abuse and exploitation. We are aware of the daily abuse, beatings, murder and rape they are being subjected to by the bosses. We are aware that the justice system is failing many of them. We are tired of racist magistrates who continue to give ridiculous low sentences to the murderers of farm workers. We call for the speedy transformation of the judiciary so that farm workers to can be treated as human beings like all of us.
We are celebrating May Day in a new environment this year. Thanks to our struggles, our government have shunned the denialism over HIV and AIDS that robbed so many thousands of their lives. On 30 April 2007 we finally signed off on the new, ambitious but necessary programme that will take our country into a new path to confront the epidemic of HIV and AIDS. We salute the leadership of the Deputy President in this regard.
Workers in the public sector and the Blue Ribbon bakeries workers have special reasons to mobilise their forces for this May Day. 2000 Blue Ribbon workers have been on strike since 5 March in support for their basic demand for a centralised bargaining arrangement. COSATU will give its full support to any further action FAWU takes to take the dispute forward, including the consumer boycott of all the Premier products, which all workers and community members are urged to implement.
This year's public service wage negotiations must mark an end to poverty wages in the public service and inform all future wage negotiations. Negotiations started on 28 November 2006. After 6 rounds of negotiations a dispute was declared on 2 April 2007, because the state refused to respond to any of the key demands.
On the 12% wage increase, the employer's position is that we must not get increases this year; instead, our wages should be adjusted by 6%. The 6% adjustment does not assist us to deal with rising food and transport costs which are way over 8%. Our employer is however, prepared to use taxpayers' money to increase the salaries of the already highly paid government executives by 57%. The Director General's salary increase this year is more than double the annual salary of a Level 1 worker.
The employer also refuses to agree to close the wage gap by reducing the current salary notches from 16 to 5 and collapsing levels 1 and 2 into level 3. Practically, this means the employer's attitude is to sustain inequalities, poverty and suffering for the majority that is paid low wages in the public service.
On job creation, the filling of vacant posts to deal with overwork due to shortage of staff, the employer has no plan or political will to do what we demand. The implication of the employer's attitude and behaviour is that public service delivery will not be improved and the employer will continue to blame us for that. We want the community to understand that poor public service delivery is due to staff shortages and overwork, lack of tools and facilities to perform our work efficiently, and not that we do not want to work as the employer keeps telling the public. There is too much work and too few workers who are paid peanuts to do the work.
The employer refuses to review all conditions of employment to bring in a new dispensation to modernise and humanise labour relations based on fair and equitable distribution of the country's wealth, without further exploitation of our labour. These include medical aid and housing allowances. The employer refuses to review the medical aid at the time when our country is devastated by HIV/AIDS pandemic as well as many preventable, infectious and communicable diseases.
COSATU unions have declared a dispute on 2 April 2007. Before we can go on strike we need to go through next conciliation round this week. If conciliation fails COSATU will back fully a decision for a full-blown strike. We call upon all workers, our communities and civil society organisations to support us in the struggle for better wages for all.
The only way to ensure policies in favour of workers and the poor is to mobilise our power in support of our demands for decent work and an end to poverty. That is why we have to make the Jobs and Poverty Campaign a success. May Day gives us the ideal platform to push these demands.
As always on this international workers’ day, COSATU will recommit itself to solidarity with fellow workers who are under attack – in Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Palestine, Colombia, Burma and other parts of the world.
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