Taking COSATU Today Forward, 10 May 2024
Norman Mampane
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COSATU TODAY Today, it’s #CosatuRedFridays #Back2Basics #ElijahBarayiBrigades #VoteANC #ClassStruggle “Build Working Class Unity for Economic Liberation towards Socialism” #Back2Basics #JoinCOSATUNow #ClassConsciousness |
Taking COSATU Today Forward
‘Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a revolutionary in the full sense’-Maoo
Our side of the story
10 May 2024
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Contents
- Workers Parliament: Back to Basics!
- POPCRU on the SAPS’s danger hikes for elite units in bid to halt exodus to private sector
- Media Alert: COSATU’s President Zingiswa Losi and General Secretary Solly Phetoe to join the NUM march against imminent retrenchments at Sibanye Stillwater on Saturday 11 May 2024
- South Africa
- COSATU welcomes the National Council of Provinces' adoption of the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Bill
- COSATU welcomes President Ramaphosa's assenting to the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill
- COSATU welcomes the National Council of Provinces' adoption of the long awaited Public Procurement Bill
- COSATU supports government's sober approach to releasing excess reserves from the SARB to ease the state's budgetary challenges
- International-Workers’ Solidarity!
- Liberian union signs collective agreement
Workers’ Parliament-Back2Basics
POPCRU on the SAPS’s danger hikes for elite units in bid to halt exodus to private sector
Richard Mamabolo, POPCRU National Spokesperson, 9 May 2024
While the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) was the first to highlight the challenges relating to the diminishing capacity of specialised skills to an exodus into the private sector by these members, we also note recent developments announced the South African Police Service (SAPS) to increase danger allowances for the Special Task Force and the National Intervention Unit to R21,000 from a contemptable R4,000.
Be that as it may, we are equally concerned that this decision was taken outside the bounds of recognised platforms such as the bargaining council, once again demonstrating the continued unilateralism on the part of the SAPS, and by implication an attack on collective bargaining.
For this, the POPCRU leadership demands that such and other matters are tabled and concluded at the right platform, which is the Safety and Security Sectoral Bargaining Council (SSSBC).
In the same vein, we are of the view that all members within the employ of the SAPS perform dangerous tasks at all levels, and this prompts for a wholistic discussion in which all Police Act members should get an increase in their danger allowances. With relation to Public Service Act (PSA) members, the union is currently engaged with the SAPS management in ensuring they realise a clear career-path.
These discussions should speak to the total revamping of the entire SAPS salary structure.
The leadership of POPCRU will be extensively engaging with the relevant authorities in taking up matters pertaining to these developments, including with the Minister of Transport as traffic officers also bear the brunt of the many challenges within their scope of operation.
Issued by POPCRU
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Media Alert: COSATU’s President Zingiswa Losi and General Secretary Solly Phetoe to join the NUM march against imminent retrenchments at Sibanye Stillwater on Saturday 11 May 2024
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)’s President Zingiswa Losi and General Secretary Solly Phetoe will join the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)’s protest march tonglomerate Sibanye Stillwater at Kloof Mine in Caltonville, Gauteng on Saturday 11 May.
Sibanye Stillwater has issued Section 189 retrenchments notices threatening the jobs of 3 107 mineworkers and 915 contractors. This will be a devastating blow to those workers, their families and communities that we cannot accept.
The march to Kloof Mine will deliver a memorandum of demands expressing workers’ deep anger and rejection of the proposed retrenchments and other proposals that seek to undermine and make the conditions of employment unbearable for employees.
COSATU stands in solidarity with the members of the National Union of Mineworkers, who have been experiencing retrenchments every year at the hands of inhumane employers who look for any excuse to retrench workers and refuse to engage on meaningful alternatives.
The management of Sibanye Stillwater and its CEO Neal Froneman are clearly incapable of running and stabilizing the mining company. The blood, sweat and tears of miners are made a mockery of whilst the very same management are content to pay themselves exorbitant packages worth hundreds of millions whilst mine workers struggle to survive on their meagre wages.
Issued by COSATU
COSATU welcomes the National Council of Provinces' adoption of the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Bill
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the National Council of Provinces’ adoption of the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land (PDAL) Bill. The Federation participated extensively on it with the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform at Nedlac. We support the Bill in full and urge President Cyril Ramaphosa to assent to it enactment.
The Bill is a long overdue intervention to ensure the nation’s food security. South Africa is fortunate to have a well-developed and highly diversified agricultural sector that ensures the nation’s food requirements in most instances. The development of this sector has taken centuries to build and must be jealously guarded.
Agriculture and the food value chain provide employment for more than 1 million workers and is one of the largest and most strategic economic sectors. The sector is under threat for a variety of reasons and has seen many farmers, emerging and commercial, struggle to survive and often simply forfeiting their farms when they can no longer afford to pay their debts. Many municipalities in desperation for funds, rezone agricultural land to private developers building shopping malls etc., due to the higher rates such developments yield.
If agricultural land is not preserved for food production, the nation’s food security will be at risk, as well hundreds of thousands of badly needed jobs. If we continue to allow agricultural land to be rezoned recklessly by clueless Councillors or planning officials enticed by bribes from developers, we will collapse any efforts at effecting land reform. This is a key developmental planning Bill whose passage by Parliament must be prioritised.
Key progressive provisions in the Bill include:
- A Registry and system for grading agricultural land to determine what land is most suitable for which type of crops and livestock. This will help guide emerging farmers and support their endeavours. It is key that all levels of government have an accurate database of arable agricultural land if they are to preserve it for agricultural development.
- Provincial Agricultural Sector Plans that will be key to ensuring provincial departments plan properly and lead agricultural development initiatives. These will enable stakeholders and national government to hold provincial governments accountable.
- Protected Agricultural Areas will compel the relevant spheres of government to preserve highly arable land, in particular the Departments responsible for Agriculture and Land.
- Rezoning Processes empowering the Minister and government to protect and preserve agricultural land and play an oversight and authorising role over municipalities’ agricultural land rezoning processes.
- Advisory Appeal Panel, whilst COSATU supports the establishment of the Panel, it is critical representation from organised labour be included to ensure the voice of agricultural workers is felt in the Panel’s work.
- Inspectors need to be empowered to issue compliance orders to ensure the progressive objectives of the Bill are implemented and offending municipalities are held accountable and dealt with.
COSATU supports the PDAL Bill due to its progressive and long overdue provisions. It will help ensure the nation’s food security, national sovereignty, a key economic and export sector with over 1 million jobs. We urge Government to expedite its implementation and ensure the relevant organs of state are fully capacitated to do so.
Issued by COSATU
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COSATU welcomes President Ramaphosa's assenting to the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes President Cyril Ramaphosa’s assenting to the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill.
South Africa is still grappling with the legacies of apartheid and colonialism. Many South Africans bear the pains of brutality inflected on them and their families by decades of enforced racism and hate crimes. We witness all too often serious incidents of hate speech and hate crimes occuring in South Africa. A few years ago, a resident of KwaZulu-Natal was sentenced to prison for spewing racial hate speech on Facebook, a community in Centurion saw mobilisation against the establishment of a Mosque, White students have been found guilty at the University of the Free State for urinating in the food of African cleaning staff etc.
The experience of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide is testimony that hate crimes and hate speech cannot be taken lightly. Whilst hate speech at times may be dismissed as the utterances of idiots best ignored, they can as Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Germany, and indeed South Africa and countless other countries have shown lead to hate crimes, violence, murder and genocide.
It is critical the appropriate balance is found. The Constitution enshrines the right to freedom of speech, thought and political association. It also places an obligation upon the state to protect ordinary persons from unfair discrimination.
All rights are accompanied by responsibilities. Whilst the law must protect ordinary citizens and workers from hate speech, it is also important to avoid allowing inept politicians cover to hide their ineptness and sometimes criminal behaviour behind.
The Act provides the right balance and a sober framework. It recognises South Africa is a constitutional democracy that can be very noisy, and necessarily so. It allows space for robust engagements within fair legal parameters. It affirms the need to protect ordinary citizens from hate crimes and hate speech. It is a progressive response by the African National Congress led government to address our still painful wounds.
COSATU urges government to move with speed to ensure the South African Police Service, Judiciary and other relevant organs are fully capacitated to implement this progressive and long overdue Act.
Issued
by COSATU
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COSATU welcomes the National Council of Provinces' adoption of the long awaited Public Procurement Bill
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the National Council of Provinces (NCOP)’ adoption of the long-awaited Public Procurement Bill. This critical Bill lays the foundation for a single public procurement system across the entire state, e.g. departments, municipalities, entities and State-Owned Enterprises.
Currently there is not a single public procurement legislative framework and consequently the situation in many state institutions is akin to something from the wild west. The existing legislative gaps were brought to a fore in 2022 when the Constitutional Court declared that Treasury lacked the legislative powers to set local content and Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment public procurement criteria.
The Zondo Commission heard countless evidence of how our leaky public procurement systems enable widespread corruption and wasteful expenditure.
COSATU engaged extensively with Treasury and Organised Business on the Bill at Nedlac and reached consensus on the majority of the Bill’s provisions. We welcome the Bill’s:
- Establishing a single public procurement framework for the entire state. This will enable common standards to be established across often-fragmented government institutions.
- Requiring public procurement processes take into account and support local content and BBBEE. This is key to supporting and creating local jobs and transforming our still racially skewed economy.
- Establishing a single online site where all tender information will be available to the public. This will shine a massive spotlight on the murky world of tenders and help expose and discourage corruption.
- Enabling the centralised procurement of certain key items to help the state save badly needed revenue.
- Empowering the Chief Procurement Office in Treasury to intervene and halt public procurement that falls foul of the law. This will be a powerful tool to tackle often openly corrupt tenders.
We are pleased with the National Council of Provinces’ amendments to the Bill strengthening its anti-corruption provisions as well as:
- Require the public disclosure and recording of any relatives of politically influential persons who receive tenders as a way of preventing the abuse of public procurement by persons in senior office.
- Elevating local content into a requirement for public procurement. This is key to protecting and growing local industries and badly needed jobs.
We remain concerned that the Bill is not sufficiently binding upon local government, a source of entrenched procurement corruption. COSATU welcomes the agreement with Parliament that this is a foundation Bill, and that government must revert back to Nedlac and Parliament within 24 months with regulations and a further supplementary Bill to further strengthen and enhance the Bill’s provisions.
We look forward to the National Assembly soon passing this progressive Bill that will play a key role in tackling corruption and supporting local procurement and jobs. This is an important step by the African National Congress led government to cleanse and renew the state and spur the economy.
Issued
by COSATU
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COSATU supports government's sober approach to releasing excess reserves from the SARB to ease the state's budgetary challenges
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) supports the African National Congress led government’s sober approach to releasing excess reserves from the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to ease the state’s budgetary challenges.
We welcome the National Council of Provinces’ passage of the Gold and Foreign Exchange Contingency Reserve Account Defrayal Amendment Bill providing for this relief for the fiscus.
Government is experiencing severe fiscal pressures combined with a painful revenue shortfall and many competing expenditure priorities.
Releasing R100 billion in 2024, R25 billion in 2025 and R25 billion in 2026 to ease the fiscal pressures facing the state whilst simultaneously ensuring the SARB retains sufficient reserves to protect the value of the Rand and economy and ensure its financial obligations are honoured is the correct approach, especially since there are sufficient reserves to do so.
We appreciate that these amount of reserves will not always be available and in reality this is a once off relief, albeit over three years, to assist the state to invest in public services, rebuild the State-Owned Enterprises, grow the economy and provide relief to the poor.
It is critical that this relief be used in a strategic manner that will grow the economy and not merely for consumption or recurring expenditure.
In particular it should be used to assist Eskom and Transnet as this will not only assist in rebuilding our two most critical economic assets but help unlock the mining, manufacturing and agricultural sectors in particular and the economy as a whole and also help save and create thousands of badly needed jobs.
Issued by COSATU
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COSATU welcomes the National Assembly's rejection of the DA's anti-worker and reckless Responsible Spending Bill
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the National Assembly’s rejection of the Democratic Alliance (DA)’s anti-worker and reckless Responsible Spending Bill.
The DA’s Bill is a shocking attempt to impose brutal 10% plus salary cuts on nurses, teachers, police officers and other hard working and low paid public servants for the next 4 years and beyond.
The DA Bill tabled at Parliament proposes that for the next four years when the debt to gross domestic product ratio is:
- Under 55%, public servants receive a 1% increase on average.
- Between 55% and 60%, public servants receive a 0% increase.
- Over 60%, public servants receive a 5% increase.
The DA Bill delinks increases in wages for cleaners, nurses and correctional service officers and other public servants from being pegged to inflation and be linked instead to the economy’s growth rate. This will mean that under a DA administration, public servants would see on average a 10% plus reduction in their wages each year for the next decade.
It is to the DA’s discredit that the Bill is silent on the very comfortable salaries of its Members of Parliament, the Provincial Legislatures and Municipal Councils. It is to the DA’s shame that it voted against the progressive Companies Amendment Bill recently passed by Parliament that requires listed companies and State-Owned Enterprises to disclose the salaries and gap between what they pay their highest and lower earners to their shareholders and the public as part of reducing the painful apartheid wage and moving South Africa to a fairer wage regime.
The public service wage bill despite misleading scarecrows flighted by some, is not ballooning, in fact it has fallen from 35% to 31.7%. We should be worried about the declining public service headcount ratio when we had 1 million public servants servicing 34 million South Africans in 1994, to 1.2 million public servants today for a population that has nearly doubled to 62 million. This declining head count has placed great strain upon the ability of the state to provide the quality public services that working class communities and the economy depend upon.
The Bill is a brazen attempt to collapse workers’ hard-won constitutional rights to collective bargaining, delegate this to a legislative fiat and thus would not pass constitutional muster.
The Federation agrees that a debate is needed on the correct debt level and a path to ensure that it is placed on a sustainable path. The solution to managing the debt, is to grow the economy, fix Eskom and Transnet and other critical State-Owned Enterprises, rebuild the state, provide relief for the poor and unemployed. Pickpocketing paramedics and doctors will not only plunge them into debt but in fact spark a brain drain of skilled public servants from the state to the private sector and overseas.
COSATU is pleased Parliament has dismissed this anti-worker Bill as a populist election pamphlet and a callous attempt to dump the bill for state capture and corruption upon nurses and teachers. This is sobering reminder that workers’ lives and wages cannot be trusted with a DA that is inherently hostile to workers’ needs and that the only party that stands with workers, is the African National Congress.
Issued by COSATU
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COSATU welcomes National Assembly's passage of the Older Persons Amendment Bill
Matthew Parks, COSATU Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator, 09 May 2024
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the National Assembly’s passage of the Older Persons Amendment Bill. The Federation supports the Older Persons Amendment Bill and urges Parliament to expedite the adoption of this long overdue progressive Bill.
We welcome this important Bill as it seeks to ensure older persons can retire in peace and are protected from abuses we have all too often witnessed in old age homes or even from their own family members.
Key provisions in the Bill that seek to affirm the dignity and rights of the elderly include measures to:
- Set minimum norms and oversight over old age homes to prevent some of the horrific crimes that shocked the nation in the past.
- Protect their assets and inheritances from unscrupulous relatives who seek to abuse them for their own benefit.
- Requiring temporary safe care be provided for the elderly who have been victims of abuse including removing them from dangerous environments.
- Oblige anyone who has seen abuses taking place to persons in authority and for these to be investigated and acted upon.
- Instituting educational support and special care for the elderly with regards to illnesses and chronic diseases as risks to infection and chronic diseases increase with age.
An important part of our efforts to build a more caring society is ensuring the most vulnerable are protected from abuse and the elderly can retire in comfort and dignity.
We are pleased government led by the African National Congress has tabled this Bill at Parliament and look forward to its becoming law. It will be critical that government deploys the necessary resources, including employing more social and health workers, to ensure its progressive goals become a living reality.
Issued by COSATU
International-Solidarity
Liberian union signs collective agreement
8 May, 2024
IndustriALL affiliated union, United Workers Union of Liberia (UWUL) signed a three-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with public utility Liberia Electricity Corporation on 2 May, after months of negotiations.
The CBA will benefit about 700 workers out of a workforce of over 1200. According to UWUL some of the gains from the collective bargaining agreement, which will cover the period from January 2024 to December 2026, include a 10 per cent increase that will be paid to the lowest paid workers whose average wages are US$250 per month. There will also be a US$50 payment for all workers in the second and third shifts, educational assistance for three dependants of US$110, standby allowances, relocation allowances, and electricity benefits.
The CBA also awards Independence Day bonuses which are paid on 26 July, when the West African country attained independence from the United States of America in 1847, and annual bonuses. For the first time, the union also negotiated for a five-day paid paternity leave.
An article in the CBA also includes provisions on workplace policies that are derived from International Labour Organization Convention 190 on ending gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work. This is the fifth CBA to be signed by UWUL with the Liberia Electricity Corporation. About 33 per cent of the workforce is made up of women.
Vacus Wilmont Kun, director of education and training said:
“The workers are pleased with the outcome of the negotiations especially the increase in benefits because these have monetary values. For example, the electricity benefits will give workers electricity coupons for six months during the rainy season and this contributes significantly to living wages.”
He further explained that the CBAs have made incremental gains over the years, and this has improved workers livelihoods and that during the rainy season the country’s hydroelectric power generating capacity was at the peak and workers would benefit from this energy generation.
“With the increasing cost of living, we always celebrate when unions negotiate wage deals that are above inflation and increase benefits as this eases the financial pressure on workers and their families. IndustriALL applauds UWUL for continuing the campaign for living wages in the energy sector in Liberia,”
said Paule France Ndessomin, IndustriALL Sub-Saharan Africa regional secretary.
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Norman Mampane (Shopsteward Editor)
Congress of South African Trade Unions
110 Jorissen Cnr Simmonds Street, Braamfontein, 2017
P.O.Box 1019, Johannesburg, 2000, South Africa
Tel: +27 11 339-4911 Direct line: 010 219-1348