POVERTY
SIYABONGA SITHOLE
Cosatu has called on all South Africans, young and old, employed and unemployed to join their national strike against the country's economic collapse. The strike is set for Wednesday, August 24. The call comes on the back of rising food and fuel costs and high rates of unemployment in the country. Cosatu has also called on all its members across the country to down tools and join pickets on the day.
According to Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi, the intention of the national shutdown was to highlight the plight of workers and force policymakers to take drastic steps to stop the economic collapse that was taking place, affecting the lives of millions of workers and the economically excluded poor.
“This is a legally protected strike that is meant to pile on the pressure on both the government and and the private sector to fix the economic mess that country finds itself in.
“Currently, half the country lives in poverty with many families forced to live without adequate food and many of them cannot find jobs. Workers are dealing with wage stagnation with their wages repealed by inflation and punishing,” Losi said.
According to Losi, some of workers are so poor that they spend more more on transport than they earn.
Cosatu said austerity measures implemented by the government were not working.
“There has been a blatant attempt to erode workers’ hard-won rights and reverse the gains of democracy,” she said.
Cosatu said for things to change, decision makers must acknowledge that poverty was not accidental but flowed from the logic of the capitalist system.
“This capitalist system has been propped up by government policies for over a quarter of a century. Cosatu has called on government to play a meaningful and leading role to revive the economy.
“The state is a political force with a lot of influence. It holds a monopoly to tax, print money and engage in borrowing on behalf of the country. It influences who has access to national productive resources and also determines how those resources are deployed and used. It is within this context that the role of the state should be understood and framed. The current problems cannot be fixed by the private sector but by an assertive state working with the private sector,” she said.
With the country seeing high levels of violent crime and a lack of support for the public sector, Cosatu called for a new public sector model that would not merely pay lip service to issues, and an end to tender system.
“We cannot continue with a system of tender and procurement contracts between the state and private sector that has spawned an industry of corruption and fraud. If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, thousands of leaders would be in jail,” Losi said.
The strike was also a demand for the reversal of the budget cuts that led to the unacceptable wage freeze and for the private sector to abandon its investment strike that has seen companies hoard and export cash reserves.
“The private sector needs to work with organised labour to accelerate the implementation of the progressive commitments of the economic recovery and reconstruction plan,” Cosatu said.