COSATU Today 1 July 2009
Patrick Craven
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Published by the Congress of South African Trade Unions
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COSATU’s Spokesperson is: Patrick Craven
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- COSATU Today -
Our side of the story
Wednesday 1 July 2009
Contents
1.1 War looms at Eskom over wages
1.2 Notice for strike action served on construction employers
1.3 NEHAWU proud of being part and a co-leader of finalisation of OSD for medical cluster
1.4 SADTU unhappy with employer delays on OSD negotiations
2.1 NUMSA condemns Reserve Bank’s failure to cut interest rates
2.2 DA attack COSATU in NW Legislature
2.5 Zwelinzima Vavi’s opening address to COSATU Skills Conference, 1 July 2009
1
Workers’ news
1.1 War looms at Eskom over wages
Lesiba Seshoka, Head: NUM Media & Communications, 30 June 2009
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has rejected Eskom ‘s “final offer” of 8% in the current wage negotiations. The NUM lowered its 15% demand to 14% whilst the power utility refused to budge.
The union has together with two other unions organizing at Eskom requested the power utility to provide information on the wage bill for both the bargaining unit employees and MPS bands, the new proposed structure and the impact of the R60 000 housing allowance offered to MPS band. The power utility refused to shed any light on these matters.
“Workers need the 14% to be able to afford the exorbitant price of electricity. You cannot get a tariff increment of 31,33% and refuse workers an increment that should enable them to afford your high prices” says Paris Mashego, the NUM negotiator at Eskom.
“A big fight will come the Eskom way if they think we are playing. They must just go to Health and ask the Doctors what happens if one party is arrogant” says Mashego.
1.2 Notice for strike action served on construction employers
Lesiba Seshoka, Head: NUM Media & Communications, 30 June 2009
The NUM has this morning served the South African Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors (SAFCEC),the construction sector ‘s employer body with a notice to go on strike. This comes after the marathon talks collapsed last Friday and the NUM accepted the certificate of non-resolution to the dispute to go on strike. Meanwhile, mobilization has begun and a strike action is set to begin on the 8th of July. The NUM had lowered its demand to 13% for a one year agreement whilst the employer is steadfast on a 10% increment for the first year and CPI for the second year. The NUM rejected the insult offered by SAFCEC and is currently mobilizing for a national industrial action.
The following projects will be affected by the industrial action:
Kwa - Zulu Natal Region
1. Moses Mabhida Stadium
2. King Shaka International Airport
3. Durban Harbour Project
4. Van Reneen Project
5. Ingula Power Station
6. Inanda Arterial Project
7. WBHO Ballito Project
8. Richards Bay Harbour
Highveld Region
9. Kusile Project
10. GGV Project
11. Klipspruit Project
12. Mafube Project
13. DMO Project
Rustenburg Region
14. Medupi Project
Eastern Cape Region
15. Coega Project
16. Nelson Mandela Stadium
17. Kempston Road E/CAPE
18. Livingston Hospital {WBHO}
19. N2 Bridge {EASTEN CAPE}
20. Old Harbour {DOCKS}
21. Goven Mbeki Project
22. Umtata Stadium
PWV Region
23. Guatrain Project
24. GFIP Highways Projects
25. Monte Casino Project
26. Siyavaya Project
27. Soccer City Stadium
North East Region
28. Komati Project
29. Peter Mokaba Stadium
30. Petersburg Mall
31. Secunda Project
Western Cape Region
32. Green Point Stadium
33. N2 Freeway
34. R300 Freeway
Kimberly Region
35. Sishen Mine Project
1.3 NEHAWU proud of being part and a co-leader of finalisation of OSD for medical cluster
Sizwe Pamla, NEHAWU Media Liaison Officer, 30 June 2009
NEHAWU welcomes the finalization of the negotiations on OSD for the medical cluster within the deadline set on the 12th of June this year by the council (PSCBC). The council said all the outstanding OSD’s should be finalised before the end of June 2009, and that has been done for the medical cluster.
The union hopes that the agreement that will now be subjected to our internal mandating processes will be accepted by the workers and will bring to an end to the sporadic wild cats strikes of doctors across the country.
We commend the negotiators for both trade unions and the employer for having worked around the clock to finalise the sector specific matters in relation to Resolution 1 of 2007. This clearly demonstrates the commitment to dialogue as the best method to resolve labour related matters.
We regret that the legitimate frustration of the doctors has resulted in these strikes that have badly affected the provision of quality healthcare to the poor people of this country and we hope that appropriate lessons have been learnt.
During these strikes there were no winners and the biggest losers were the poor people who rely on the public institutions for their healthcare. We hope that all stakeholders will move forward with a renewed commitment to serve the poor and we urge and commend the doctors for not leaving the public sector and take away their valuable skills.
We are disturbed by the reports that some of the doctors have been served with dismissal letters, with the already overburdened health system that is short of scarce skills. We will be engaging with the government to discuss their immediate reinstatement despite the fact that some are not our members and members of trade unions.
We call on all our doctors across the country to participate in the mandating processes of their respective trade unions for this agreement to be speedily concluded. We also call upon all doctors to accept union leadership because it is safe to do so. Forums without organisational rights cannot defend the interests of the workers including doctors because they are not admitted to legitimate councils which negotiate workers’ lot.
1.4 SADTU unhappy with employer delays on OSD negotiations
Thobile Ntola, SADTU President, 30 June 2009
Labour tabled their revised and costed offer on Friday, 26 June 2009 and engaged their Employer until late in the night. The Employer then indicated that they would be seeking mandate on the revised demand from labour. The Employer then came back on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 with the same position as of Friday. Labour is therefore of the view that the Employer is not serious about addressing the outstanding issues of the OSD as raised by Labour, despite the deadline of the 30 June 2009.
Labour therefore reiterates their position as outlined below:
Occupation Specific Dispensation (OSD)
This is outstanding business arising out of the agreement reached in the PSCBC in 2007 to end the public service strike, with the implementation of OSD.
SADTU sees the culmination of the OSD talks as a contribution to the objective of attracting and retaining professionals in the public service; this within the broader context of service delivery in a developmental state.
SADTU’s OSD demands have been reformulated as follows:
· A basic entry-level salary of R180,000 pa for newly qualified teachers, to be implemented over period of four years.
· Salary progression for 2007/8 and 2008/9 to be paid by 1 July 2009
· Accelerated pay progression to be brought forward to 1 July 2010and 2012
· One notch (1%) to be paid for every three years in respect of recognition of experience (We have moved from 2 notches for one year of service rendered)
· All educators below REQV 13 to be paid at the level of REQV 13 after implementation of a streamlined RPL system (recognition of prior learning for salary purposes)
· Senior and master teachers to be accelerated by additional six notches.
The employer wants the teachers to pay themselves out of their own savings.
We are giving the employer up until end of business today 30 June 2009 to meet our demands.
SADTU will therefore consult its members on the appropriate action to take if the employer fails to meet our demands.
2 South Africa
2.1 NUMSA condemns Reserve Bank’s failure to cut interest rates
Alex Mashilo, Numsa Spokesperson, 30 June 2009
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) rejects Eskom’s 8 per cent wage offer.
NUMSA condemns Eskom for negotiating in bad faith in the wage negotiations that are underway and rejects the company’s 8 per cent wage offer.
The company is refusing to disclose relevant information without which the negotiations are rendered meaningless. This information includes details of the wage bills between the bargaining unit and the Management, Professionals and Specialist (MPS) levels; and the financial impact of the lucrative R60.000.00 housing allowance enjoyed by certain categories of employees at MPS levels.
Just few months ago Eskom offered increases ranging from 25 per cent to 30 per cent at MPS levels. This amounts to looting as compared to the reasonable 14 per cent increase that the company is refusing to the real workforce that works in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, and ensures a smooth supply by working 24 hours.
Just recently, Eskom has been permitted to increase the cost of electricity by 31 per cent. If we put aside the other bold sounding reasons that the company put forward in applying for this increase, the unmentioned reality is that the motive forces of looting in the company’s top employment levels and categories look forward to augmenting their salaries, extending their benefits and heaping up their already overflowing bonuses all at the cost of the workers and the poor.
As the union we are determined to eliminate income inequalities not only at Eskom but in South Africa. Up to so far we have avoided pulling off the plug and unleashing a black out through a strike but Eskom is persistently pushing us to this direction. We are presently consulting with our members on the way forward to achieving our 14 per cent wage demand. Until Eskom discloses all the relevant information it is impossible to make any move from this point.
While continuing to refuse pulling off the plug and unleashing black out, we shall work together with fraternal and community organisations on our bargaining demands to Eskom. We shall also mobilise to address the many other problems that this company is visiting on the workers and the poor.
2.2 DA attack COSATU in NW Legislature
Solly Phetoe, COSATU NW Provincial Secretary, 1 July 2009
COSATU in the North West Province has condemned the personal attack by DA spokesperson, Mr. Hatting, on the COSATU North West Provincial Secretary and farm workers, during the debate in the legislature on 30th June 2009.
We are not members of the legislature, so it is not procedural for the DA spokesperson to attack the COSATU leadership during the debate on the killing of farm workers in the legislature when he knows that we will not be able to respond.
We are an independent trade union federation; we don’t need permission from an apartheid party or from Hatting, whom we know now after his racist attack to COSATU on the issue of killing farm workers in the province.
We do not expect DA or Hatting to be different for its leader, Helen Zille, who is based in the Western Cape Province. We do not need scientific doctors or investigations. These killings, assaults and abuse of farm workers in the province are let by racist farmers. Hatting’s personal attack on the COSATU Provincial Secretary during the debate in the legislature will not stop us exposing the DA’s racist practices including those by its spokesperson, Mr. Hatting.
We are happy to report to the people of this province that at least now we know who are the senior racist leading the perpetrators of the abuse, assaults and killings of farm workers. We know who has been leading the threats against the COSATU Provincial Secretary and his family since the racial killing of members of the Skierluk communities by Johan Nel who is in jail serving his life sentence.
We know that this is a clear response from those who supported Johan Nel during his trial, following the shooting attack on 14th January 2008.
Mr Hatting must respond to the racist killing of farm workers carried out by white farmers and bring some solution to these animals, who are led by him, who is opposed to democracy, revolution and human rights.
Racist leaders like Mr Hatting and Helen Zille must know that they are wasting their time. Their apartheid regime will not be back. COSATU and its alliance will continue to be strong for the next 100 years to make sure the ANC leads this country. The apartheid political party will not lead this country anymore; they will continue to be the opposition in those small numbers as they are.
Benzi ka-Soko, POPCRU National Spokesperson, 30 June 2009
It is really disturbing that there are new reports about price-fixing by different companies especially in the food industry. These reports come amid the on-going difficulties presented by the onslaught of the global economic recession. It should be mentioned that all types of economic crises hit the poor the hardest simply because of multiple vulnerabilities.
It is the poor who continue to live inhumanely in the shacks in our townships and other informal settlements of the Rainbow Nation. It is also the poor who continue to be victims of any disaster through the anger of Mother Nature as it always happens in the Cape Flats-Zwide in the Western Cape, Kwa-Mashu-uMlazi in Kwa-Zulu-Natal, Dipklook-Zola-Meadolands-SOWETO in Gauteng, Welamlambo-Secunda-Bethal in Mpumalanga, Ga-Mokopane-Sekhukhune in Limpopo and all other vulnerable places across the country.
Certainly, it is the poor who will suffer the most as a result of the electricity hike that was effected by the NERSA-ESKOM Coalition. As we speak, there are people and communities in South Africa who are not getting electricity because they cannot afford it. These communities live life electricitylessly. Those who are used to electricity know how frustrating it is to be without this commodity.
The electricity hike is therefore an attack on the livelihoods of the poor. This hike is going to make the life of the poor people more unbearable for it will definitely lead to a wide range of consequences such as brazier-related fatalities, cold weather related deaths as we experience one of the coldest winter periods in the history of South Africa. Government should intervene on behalf of the toiling masses of our country.
Government should begin tightening the noose around the necks of all price-fixing companies. The Competition Commission should begin calling for the imprisonment of these thugs and it is against this background that a clarion call should be made to change legislation governing commercial competition in this country. These cheaters habitually continue to rob the poor because they know that they will only pay the fines and continue with their business as usual. It cannot be business as usual, more needs to be done. Toughen the laws.
Companies like SASOL have become law unto themselves because they have continuously habitually perpetrated criminal acts flouting competition laws left, right and centre, willy nilly. SASOL et al are not above the laws of South Africa. They must be viciously punished.
These revolutionary calls are made in the light of the skyrocketing food prices and other basic commodities that are critical for human sustenance. In the very recent past, we have experienced a number of economic frustrations as a result of Capitalist policies of fiscal discipline. First, we woke up one day to newspaper headlines shouting ‘Bread-price fixing exposed’. This expose indicated that there was empirical evidence suggesting that bread-baking companies have always been involved in this commercial crime.
Adding pepper to the bleeding wound, we have also recently been told that milk-prices were also fixed. We are being told of these crimes against the poor amid the continuously increasing fuel prices that seem to have become ordinary daily occurrences in this country. Another fuel increase is on the cards. Already, more than a million cars and houses have been repossessed by the anti-people banking industry of this country. The very same banking industry is guilty of robbing the people through crazy bank charges that the JALI COMMISION found to be criminally exorbitant.
The SA public cannot continue to sit and do nothing about these rip-offs. We need to rise and rebel. We are paying highly exorbitant taxes in this country and these taxes should be making our lives better. These exorbitant taxes are supposed to improve our lives and if that is not happening, which country are we making better in paying these taxes.
We really cannot continue to live in misery and in abject poverty while the lives of the super-rich continue to nutritiously and economically blossom. The citizens of this country should begin playing their revolutionary role in the shaping of pro-poor policies for the upliftment of the plight of the downtrodden. The SA general public and the working class in particular need to be continuously reminded that indeed, they do have the power to change their destitution and that is through their labour power using revolutionary theory to engage the powers that-be. Another world is possible. We demand decent life for we deserve better.
2.4 FXI deeply disappointed by
ICASA’s stance on ‘blacklisting’
complaint
Melissa Moore, FXI Acting Executive Director, 30 June 2009
The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) is deeply disappointed by the Complaints and Compliance Committee of Independent Communication Authority of South Africa’s (CCC) decision not to deal with the wrongdoings of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in respect of the “blacklisting controversy”.
We view the decision as highly regrettable in that it does not give sufficient weight to the massive public interest in the matter. The CCC has failed to uphold the critical role played by the regulator in regulating broadcasting in the public interest and to ensure fairness, impartiality and the dissemination of unbiased information to the public.
It is critical to note that the CCC’s finding does not in any way exonerate the conduct of SABC in the blacklisting controversy. The CCC did not find that the SABC did not blacklist certain political commentators. It went so far as to state that blacklisting is, in itself, deplorable.
During 2008 FXI lodged a complaint to Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (ICASA) against the SABC. The essence of our complaint was the following:
a) That the SABC news management manipulated its news and
current affairs in the pursuit of a political agenda;
b) That when the manipulation was publically exposed, the
SABC’s news management dishonestly tried to cover it up; and
c) That the SABC Board failed to take any remedial action when its own enquiry into these matters concluded that its news management had been guilty of serious misconduct.
Our complaint was prompted by the SABC’s failure to implement the recommendations of the Sisulu Commission of Enquiry (Commission) into blacklisting of certain political commentators, and related matters, at the SABC. The Commission found that certain commentators /“had been excluded from news and current affairs programmes on grounds that that were not objectively defensible”. /
We are of the view the CCC has erred in a number of respects. The CCC has refused to deal with and pronounce upon the merits of the matter placed before it. In holding that it does not have jurisdiction over internal journalistic matters, the CCC has misconstrued its powers and interpreted such powers in an overly narrow fashion. In so doing, they have neatly avoided pronouncing on a controversial issue that falls squarely within their mandate and jurisdiction. We view this as an abdication of their duties in respect of the public broadcaster which in itself is deplorable.
Moreover, the CCC has failed to deal with the evidence that FXI placed before it, which evidence remains the only uncontroverted evidence placed before the CCC. The SABC failed to place any admissible evidence before the CCC to refute our allegations and evidence.
We are amazed at the CCC’s contention that the contamination of the preparation of programmes does not affect the end product. If the ingredients are contaminated, it goes without saying that you cannot have an honest and fair end product for consumption by the public.
What is equally astounding is the CCC’s view that there is no legal duty on the SABC to provide the public with internal information or reports on journalistic malpractice, or to inform the public on how it reacts to contraventions of its code. What the CCC forgets is that the SABC’s ultimate shareholder is the public and that the public has a constitutional right of access to all information held by the SABC.
The clandestine manner in which SABC has operated has in our view been central to the current crises in which it now finds itself. ICASA has not moved robustly and vigorously to address these issues which are central to the right to act as a public broadcaster. ICASA’s failure to address the root causes of the problem raises serious questions about the efficacy of ICASA’s policing of the industry and its commitment to constitutional principles.
FXI is currently considering its legal options in respect of the ICASA’s ruling.
2.5 Zwelinzima Vavi’s opening address to COSATU Skills Conference, 1 July 2009
I very much appreciate the opportunity to open this historic, very important - and very necessary – skills and education conference. I would like to welcome all of you here today and congratulate the organisers of the conference.
I want to congratulate our new Minister of Higher Education and Training, our very long-standing friend and comrade – the much loved Comrade Blade Nzimande, who will be here tomorrow. I am absolutely confident that he will overcome the immense challenges he faces and preside over the transformation of our higher education system.
Over the next three days we shall be assessing government’s existing education, training and skills programme and how well or badly these have served workers and the poor. We shall also critically evaluate the effectiveness of COSATU’s own policies and strategies in this area, their strengths and weaknesses.
We shall also need to examine how we can develop a better, more coordinated strategy to ensure that future education policies play their full part in our overall strategies for transforming our society as a whole, in line with our 2015 Plan.
I trust that you will lay the foundations of a comprehensive response to the range of education, training and skills challenges facing the working class, which will then have to be discussed at the COSATU 10th Congress and beyond.
To understand our situation today, we have to look at the way education and training were manipulated and deformed under apartheid, in its drive to impoverish and disempower our people. The foundation of apartheid’s discriminatory path was the denial of access to formal education and skills for the majority of our people. Even the four-year education colleges were largely barred to black people, which left black teachers with only the lowest paid teaching jobs.
As a result, many workers learned their skills at the workplace, informally, and without receiving any certificate. Remember the stories about ‘spanner boys’ or even what they used to call ‘pikinini’ who did all the work, but no matter how skilled they were, they were still classed as ‘elementary workers’ because they did not have pieces of paper to formalise their real qualifications. This meant workers could never get promoted or move to other jobs because their qualifications competencies were never recognised.
Moeletsi Mbeki should have remembered this too, before making his slanderous comments about trade unions leaders being ‘ignorant’ and ‘uneducated’. Many of them achieved brilliant educational successes despite have been disempowered under apartheid.
Many have gone on to play pivotal roles in government and business. And contrary to what our former comrade alleged, they have been, and are still being, replaced by new generations of workers-intellectuals, whose studies began in the universities of the trade unions and the workplace.
With the transition to democracy, the unions worked with the democratic movement to try to overcome the divisions and unfairness in the education and training system, which we inherited. But we still have very far to go.
We still have huge inequalities, based now on class rather than formerly on race. Because most of the upper class is still white, however, racial differences still pervade the education system. In 2003, just over half of white learners got a matric exemption, but only a tenth of Africans. Not surprisingly, our universities are still about half white. And about three quarters of management in the private sector is still white.
In the area of skills development, the main target post-1994 was to improve access to higher and further education for black workers, so that they could achieve qualifications, improve their levels of skills and their career prospects and reverse the discrimination of the past.
The importance of skills development cannot be overestimated. Unless we reverse the racist and discriminatory education policies of the apartheid era, we will never be able to reach all the other goals we have set ourselves in the struggle for the socialist transformation of our society.
That is why the skills development system, spearheaded by the SETAs, is particularly important for the workers and labour movement. Indeed, we owe the very fact that we have such structures as SETAs to the campaigns waged by unions, especially the metalworkers, during those hard years of apartheid.
But SETAs have been around now long enough to enable us to assess their successes and failures, particularly their effect on economic growth and the levels of unemployment. While we acknowledge their many important achievements, we have to admit that they have not lived up to many of our initial expectations.
The trade union movement must share the blame for some of the failures of the SETAs, which represent the best example of COSATU’s ability to bang the doors until they open, then fail to walk through the open doors. Employers too, despite largely picking up these gains, have not driven the skills revolution for the benefit of the economy as a whole.
This conference provides us the opportunity to address this weakness. Skills development to workers is one of the cornerstones of economic empowerment.
The goal when SETAs were established was to ensure that training responded to the real needs of the economy and society, rather than just becoming a paper chase to provide workers with useless and irrelevant qualifications.
Finally, we wanted to ensure that every South African can read and write. Estimates of illiteracy range widely, but probably around one in six people - mostly rural and older - are still illiterate. If people are denied access to basic literacy and numeracy, they cannot take their rightful place in society either as citizens or as workers. They will remain marginalised, at a huge personal cost to themselves and an equally great cost to society.
Comrades
Can we claim that we have succeeded in our efforts to transform the skills training system? Despite all our work and accomplishments, we have to say no; we still have very far to go.
A major concern is that the systems for recognising prior learning are still not generally in place. Consequently workers, especially black workers, still suffer from historic injustices. Where the systems do exist, they often need so much theoretical work that ordinary workers cannot afford to get the qualifications anyway.
A second concern is that most workers still do not have access to training. According to the Labour Force Survey, white men are still more likely to get training than black workers. Elementary workers have almost no access to any training. The skills levy is still low compared to more successful Asian countries, and even so much of it remains unspent. That is a major cause for concern.
There are various reasons for the problems facing the skills development system. Firstly the planning process in most companies remains firmly in the hands of management. We have not sufficiently empowered workers and shop stewards to develop demands and fight for them.
Many employers regularly, and illegally, refuse workers paid time off for training. So they are left having to take courses at weekends or in the evening, which is difficult, especially for people with families.
The SETAs are not blameless. Too often, their extensive planning requirements, even if well intentioned, have stalled progress. We must focus on getting more training to more people, and less on establishing bureaucratic systems and commissioning endless consultants’ reports.
Finally, we have not linked skills development sufficiently to employment equity. Many companies have separate committees to deal with the two issues. Yet for workers one of the main aims of skills development is so that they can advance their careers and overcome the historical racial barriers imposed under apartheid.
Some unscrupulous racist employers not only fail to train black workers but then hand the top jobs to white workers, hiding behind the excuse that “black workers are unskilled and unqualified”, which of course is their fault in the first place.
In response to these challenges, the government has pushed the concept of learnerships, particularly to involve unemployed people, and asked labour and business to improve their representation on SETA boards.
But those strategies fail to address the core problem - the failure to ensure that ordinary workers have a voice in defining skills needs and programmes. That is what COSATU must do much more consistently. The skills development programme after all reflects our demands; now we have to make it work.
We cannot afford just to discuss skills any longer in a strange jargon that that disempowers ordinary workers. We have to empower workers and their shop stewards to identify what they want from skills plans and negotiate and campaign for it.
Comrades
How does all this relate to the unemployment crisis? Unemployment does not arise primarily because of low skills and education. The average unemployed youth - and young people make up two thirds of the unemployed - has had 11 years of formal education, far more than in most developing countries, which nevertheless have much lower unemployment. We even have many unemployed university graduates.
To keep blaming unemployment on poor education and skills essentially is to blame the victim. It plays into the racist notion that black people are too uneducated to function in the formal economy. This is sheer nonsense.
Unemployment is so high because the economy is not creating jobs, and now that we are in a recession it is shedding jobs at an alarming rate. That in turn arises from low levels of investment and the emphasis on capital-intensive industries like metals, auto and heavy chemicals. It also results from highly concentrated ownership of industry that prevents growth in other sectors.
Unless we address these challenges, no amount of skills development will lead to job creation.
We very much appreciate the commitment of government, business and labour - in the historic Framework Agreement as South Africa’s Response to the Global Economic Crisis to prioritising training and skills development. It rightly identifies improving the quality of the learnership programmes, as one of the ways to avoid retrenchment.
I particularly like its proposal for ‘training layoffs’, financed by the NSF and SETAs, for workers whose employers would ordinarily retrench them and which can be introduced on terms that would keep them in employment during the economic downturn but re-skill them as an investment for the future economic recovery.
This does not mean that better education and training will not create more jobs and help the economy to grow. Education and skills development will address unemployment best however by meeting the needs of the economy for practical, technical and management skills.
Comrades and friends,
Clearly it is very hard to reconstruct the education and training system after so many decades of racist oppression. And we cannot do it from above through elitist, technical processes. We have to find ways to empower shop stewards, organisers and workers to identify what skills they want and how they can best get them.
Unless we win this battle, the danger is that millions of our people may be condemned to lives of poverty and unemployment. Our people need help and training, not only through the expanded public works programme but a range of other interventions.
These may include courses on how to organise themselves into co-ops or open small business, or how can they avoid falling prey to the omashonisa, but without misleading them into believing that all trained people will become millionaire business men or women.
We must go back to the basics of the skills development system: recognition of prior learning and a huge increase in access to training for ordinary workers, including ABET. We will beat unemployment, not by using the training system to create artificial positions, but by through a vigorous development strategy supported by a much stronger education and training system.
The struggles for education and training have a rich history in South Africa. The draft discussion paper circulated to stimulate debates in this conference reminds us of the principles underlining education and training. These principles remain relevant today. Many of them have been achieved but many still have to be achieved.
Let us remind ourselves that 70% of our schools do not have libraries and 60% do not have laboratories. Let us all recall that 60% of children are pushed out of the schooling system before they reach grade 12.
This reflects a number of challenges we still face. These include the fact that the quality of teacher education and professional development is inadequate. Today 55% of those in this profession would leave if they had a chance. Indeed 30 000 of teachers leave the profession annually.
The quality of South African education leaves much to be desired. We cannot compete with many African states on basic survival skills. Take the example of Zimbabweans. When they arrive here they simply outperform their South African counterparts on many fronts. This reflects the superior education they receive. Our basic education and higher education, working together with the labour movement and the rest of society, has to ensure an improvement of education.
A key ingredient though, is that education must function in the traditional black schools – African schools in particular. We welcome the commitment to make education one of the five priorities for the period moving forward.
Our commitment must be to help to make this priority achievable and do everything not to frustrate the endeavour. The ANC and SADTU negotiated what they called are the non negotiables - “that teachers are in school, in class, on time, teaching, that there is no abuse of learners and no neglect of duty”.
COSATU strongly supports these non-negotiables and will do everything in our power to ensure that all play their part to ensure their success. We do recognise that whilst we are trade unionists, we are at the same time parents and therefore key stakeholders in the education system. We are members of our communities before we are unionists. As parents we must ensure that we play our role in the education of our children.
The two-week long unprotected strike by Soweto educators recently has brought these discussions to the fore. We have asked for a meeting with the leadership of SADTU in Soweto in order to receive a briefing on the purpose behind this unprotected strike.
We are concerned that a revolutionary trade union movement must never act in a manner that isolates itself from the broader working class. We are a leading detachment of the working class. We call ourselves a revolutionary and transformative trade union precisely because of our ability to act to advance the broader interests of the working class.
In the same vein we welcome the tentative agreement reached by the majority of unions with the Department of Health yesterday which may end the unprotected strike by the doctors. COSATU fully supports the demands of the doctors and have, more than anyone else, ensured that the doctors’ concerns received attention at the highest level of our government authorities.
We are however concerned that in the current strike the people who are being turned away from the public hospitals are largely the black working class who, because of inequities and our history, use the public hospitals.
Whilst the doctors’ demands must not be counterposed to other priorities, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that we will lose public sympathy if this strike is not resolved soon, and if bigger and bigger numbers of our people die and/or are pushed into the private hospitals that are way beyond their means.
Lastly the conference must also address our own internal education and training programmes. In particular we will check if we implemented the policy of ensuring that we spend at least 10% of our income on educating and training our members, leaders and staff. We must ensure that before we blame everyone else we must clean our own house first.
I wish you all a very successful conference and look forward eagerly to reading the statement of your conclusions on Friday.
