Taking COSATU Today Forward Special Bulletin, 13 February 2026
Norman Mampane
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COSATU TODAY Today, it’s #CosatuRedFridays #ClassSolidarity #Cosatu40 #SACTU70 #ClassStruggle “Build Working Class Unity for Economic Liberation towards Socialism” #Back2Basics #JoinCOSATUNow #ClassConsciousness |
Taking COSATU Today Forward Special Bulletin
‘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
13 February 2026
“Build Working Class Unity for Economic Liberation towards Socialism”
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Contents
- Workers Parliament: Back to Basics!
- Media Statement: COSATU Misleading Public on R3.8 Billion Rescue for South African Post Office
- SAMWU cautiously welcomes administration of Matlosana Local Municipality
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NEIL AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU) scheduled to host a book launch
South Africa - COSATU KwaZulu-Natal leads a #CosatuRedFridays at iMpendle Local Municipality over unpaid workers’ salaries
- South African Communist Party Statement on the national water crisis
- International-Workers’ Solidarity!
- WFTU Solidarity Statement with workers of EKTAM SOFT DRINKS
- Unions call for strong AI guardrails to protect workers
- Japanese cabin crew union wins landmark victory on fatigue, safety and union rights
Workers’ Parliament-Back2Basics
SAMWU joyously welcomes the permanent appointment of 497 contract workers at Sol Plaatje Municipality
Pieter Demans, SAMWU Northern Cape Provincial Secretary, 13 February 2026
The South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) in the Northern Cape province joyously welcomes and celebrates the long-overdue permanent absorption of 497 contract workers at the Sol Plaatje Local Municipality.
This historic victory is the direct result of years of relentless struggle, consistent pressure, and the unwavering outcry of workers championed by their union, SAMWU.
In a moving ceremony marking the first phase of a Local Labour Forum (LLF) resolution, management has officially handed over the first 125 permanent appointment letters. These letters were delivered in sealed envelopes to union representatives to be presented to our members, signifying a permanent end to the era of precarious employment for these individuals.
For too long, these workers have been left in the cold. Many have served the municipality since 2013, over a decade of service, without the dignity of basic benefits such as a pension fund, medical aid, or annual bonuses. It is a sad reality that while we celebrate today, some of our comrades passed away during this struggle, still waiting for the security of a permanent post.
Others now find themselves with only a few years left before retirement, having spent the bulk of their careers in a state of uncertainty.
The turning point was reached following a militant five-day protest action, which finally compelled management to do the right thing and honour the demands of the working class. The atmosphere at the municipality was one of pure jubilation; workers were moved to tears of disbelief and joy, finally able to return home to their families and loved ones with the security they have fought so hard to achieve.
At our recent 13th Provincial Congress, SAMWU Northern Cape committed itself to an active campaign against municipalities that abuse contract workers. We resolved to stop at nothing to ensure full compliance with Section 198B of the Labour Relations Act, which protects workers against the indefinite use of fixed-term contracts.
SAMWU salutes the Local Shopsteward Committee of Sol Plaatje. Their dedication to executing the mandate of our members and their steadfast commitment to the cause have been exemplary. While we celebrate this first phase, the struggle continues.
SAMWU will remain vigilant and will continue to monitor the process until every single one of the 497 workers is fully and permanently absorbed.
Issued by SAMWU Northern Cape
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NEIL
AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU) scheduled to host a book launch
Labour Studies Seminar Series, Rhodes University, South Africa
Book launch: Henry Dee, Militant Migrants: Clements Kadalie, the ICU and the Mass Movement of Black Workers in Southern Africa, 1896-1951
4PM (SAST), Thursday 19 February: Eden Grove seminar room 3, Rhodes University; & via Zoom (details below).
THE BOOK: Malawian-born Clements Kadalie exploded on the global stage as head of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa (ICU). A massive popular movement founded in Cape Town in 1919, it also spread into Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia
and Zimbabwe. In the 1920s, the ICU completely overshadowed the nationalist and communist parties, organising perhaps 250,000 workers and labour tenants. Kadalie, a famed orator, journalist and organiser, electrified huge meetings with his calls for economic
freedom and all-in mass organisation. Praised as the most important black worker leader in the world at the time, he was championed by figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Tom Mann, and George Padmore.
Henry Dee's Militant Migrants, based on extensive research, is the first full biography of Kadalie. It examines his evolving ideas, African impact and global importance, unprecedented successes, inescapable failures, and complicated personal life. Kadalie won
wage gains and improved conditions, through strikes, campaigns and lobbying, alarming colonial states. Yet his ICU was marked by contradictions, and imploded into autocratic leadership, corruption, factionalism, and bitterness. Kadalie's story illuminates
the period in which his star rose: the Malawian diaspora and immigrant politics, class struggles and transnational organising, and battles over gender, citizenship, nation and respectability; and is also a tale of a man's fall from popular hero into alcoholism,
a broken family, and ruined reputation.
SPEAKER: Henry Dee is a research fellow at Northumbria University, UK, and a historian of empire, labour and migration in the early 20th century. Widely published, he co-edited (with David Johnson),'I See You': The Industrial and Commercial Workers'
Union of Africa, 1919-1930 a collection of primary sources (HiPSA, His biography of African labour leader Clements Kadalie, Militant Migrants ,was published by Liverpool University Press in November 2025. Henry's latest research compares trade unions across
Southern Africa, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and their engagement with the politics of migration in the late British empire.
ONLINE: Register in advance at https://tinyurl.com/yacwxt9m
(you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining).
HOSTS: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, NALSU is engaged in policy, research and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations.
We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.
MORE: https://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu
Kind regards,
Valance
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South Africa #ClassSolidarity
COSATU KwaZulu-Natal leads a #CosatuRedFridays at iMpendle Local Municipality over unpaid workers’ salaries
Edwin Mkhize, COSATU KwaZulu Natal Provincial Secretary, 13 February 2026
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in KwaZulu-Natal will, through its Red Friday Campaign, embark on a solidarity visit to iMpendle Local Municipality and lead a protest picket and demonstration together with its affiliate, the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU).
This action is in response to the continued failure by iMpendle Local Municipality to comply with basic labour obligations, including the non-payment and late payment of workers’ salaries and benefits, poor working conditions, and persistent maladministration.
COSATU condemns in the strongest terms the ongoing suffering imposed on municipal workers, who are once again approaching another month without receiving their salaries, after months of repeated late payments and instability. This situation is unacceptable, inhumane, and constitutes a direct attack on the dignity of workers.
Workers cannot be expected to deliver services while they are being treated like disposable tools.
Workers at iMpendle Local Municipality are facing the following serious violations:
- Late payment of salaries for several consecutive months
- Non-payment of January salaries
- Shortage of tools of trade, which undermines service delivery
- Non-compliance with Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, including the failure to provide Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
· Non-payment of statutory deductions and third-party contributions, including: UIF, SARS, COIDA, Pension Fund, Medical Aid, and Funeral and other insurance policies, resulting in lapsed benefits and loss of worker protection.
This crisis is not only financially devastating, it places workers and their families in unbearable hardship and strips them of the social protection they have paid for.
As COSATU we emphasise that this collapse does not only affect workers, it affects the entire community of iMpendle. When workers are unpaid and denied proper working tools, service delivery collapses.
The people of iMpendle are being subjected to unacceptable suffering. This municipality is effectively showing a middle finger to residents and voters who deserve accountable governance and reliable services.
A municipality that cannot pay workers cannot be entrusted with public funds.
COSATU notes that the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) has convened a meeting to address this matter. However, the problems persist, and this indicates either a failure of oversight or deliberate negligence.
We are asking ourselves a question who is protecting those responsible for this chaos? Why are workers made to pay the price for poor management and possible misuse of municipal resources?
This situation cannot be normalised and as COSATU KwaZulu-Natal we demand:
- Immediate payment of all outstanding salaries and benefits owed to workers.
- Full payment of all statutory deductions and third-party contributions, including UIF, SARS, COIDA, pension and medical aid funds.
- Urgent investigation into maladministration, financial mismanagement, and possible corruption at iMpendle Local Municipality.
- Consequences and disciplinary action against all officials and political office bearers responsible for this crisis.
- Provision of adequate tools of trade and PPE, and full compliance with health and safety regulations.
- Direct intervention by the Provincial Government, working urgently with National Treasury and the National Department of COGTA to stabilise the municipality and ensure workers are protected.
COSATU will not allow the exploitation and humiliation of municipal workers to continue. Workers are not beggars and salaries are not favours, but a legal obligation.
We further warn that continued failure to resolve this matter, COSATU will work with SAMWU for a full-blown mass action, as workers cannot be expected to carry a burden and starve for a faulty which is not theirs.
The struggle for workers’ dignity continues.
Issued by COSATU KwaZulu Natal
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South African Communist Party Statement on the national water crisis
Mbulelo Mandlana, SACP Head of Media, Communications and Information, 12 February 2026
The South African Communist Party (SACP) is extremely concerned by the current national water crisis in the country. The taps have been dry for months in several parts of the country and where there has been no constant absence of water the residents have been forced to contend with inconsistent water supply which is equally unacceptable.
The water crisis is not mere momentary interruption but has now become a standing crisis not affecting isolated communities but affects all across the country, with the working class and poor being the most impacted.
Understood historically and within the prism of our unequal socioeconomic conditions in the country, this crisis has had the worst and more enduring impact in the affected working-class and rural communities for a far longer period of time. The lack of water in our communities is as a result of both objective collapse of infrastructure because of its gross mismanagement but also a result of deliberate neglect and manipulation connected to tenderpreneurs and corrupt municipal officials who loot state resources through emergency water provision. The water mafia with water tankers was born and continues to operate and indeed thrive within this framework and environment.
As the SACP, we have repeatedly raised the issue of the collapse of public infrastructure and services, including water supply, as a result of a corrupt managerial class in the local state whose corruption and economic entanglement with tenderpreneurs has left the municipal system in a state of decay.
In addition to this, the government has been advancing a thoroughgoing austerity programme that has led to an increased incapacity of the local state to meet the needs of the people through effective delivery of services. This combination of all these factors has contributed to the crisis we have now come to experience as the people of South Africa.
While everyone deserves an appropriate provision of public services regardless of their location or neighbourhood, it must be said that the communities in the periphery of the big metropolitan cities, working class communities in rural areas and townships, have invariably experienced this crisis for longer with even a greater impact on their lives.
The government at the same time intends to use this crisis to privatise government services as they have already resumed to plan and implement such activities through the so called “Operation Vulindlela”. It is our concern as the SACP that a crisis of this proportion could be used to justify a neoliberal agenda inherently antithetical to the interests of the working class and poor. We reject any and all moves by the GNU to exploit public anxiety regarding the water crisis to disempower them by transferring public institutions to private profit-seeking entities that prioritise their financial gain over development.
The resolution of the water crisis has transcended local concerns and has become a national priority. Water provision is not a matter that can be postponed; it must be addressed immediately. The use of underground water through boreholes is a crucial consideration and option that the government should explore. The repair of water infrastructure should not be used as an excuse when public water supplies are unavailable.
The longer-term solution to the water crisis lies in the strengthening of the local state to provide services by removing the tender system in local government and consolidating state’s ability to plan, intervene and resource the provision of services for which it will be accountable. The use of the private sector in provision of services has proven detrimental to the welfare of the people and can no longer be justified going forward. Additionally, the direct accountability of the actors in the local state is crucial to moving forward in this regard rather than corrupt partnerships with profit seekers. That is the foundational principle upon which the transformational nature of our state was envisioned and therefore ought to be applied.
We call on the communities to continue to demand the correction of the crisis and the restoration of functioning municipalities accountable to the people they serve. We reject the use of this crisis to deepen neoliberalism and the systemic hollowing out of the state through neoliberal measures such as “Operation Vulindlela”.
We further call on the President and cabinet to institute immediate measures to alleviate this crisis across the country and the local state with the view to empower municipalities rather than replace them with tenderpreneurs. We condemn politicians that have downplayed, undermined and sneered at the demands of our people for water provision as tone deaf and reactionary in the worst way possible.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY,
FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA.
Media, Communications & Information Department | MCID
International-Solidarity
WFTU Solidarity Statement with workers of EKTAM SOFT DRINKS
13 February 2026
The World Federation of Trade Unions, representing more than 105 million workers in 134 countries across all continents, strongly condemns the dismissal of 37 workers of EKTAM SOFT DRINKS in Famagusta, Cyprus, immediately after they demanded a collective agreement.
The international class-oriented trade union movement expresses its full and unconditional solidarity with the EMEK-İŞ union, their just demands, and the indefinite strike that began a week ago.
We denounce the anti-union actions and practices carried out by the company, targeting the workers who courageously defend their interests struggling for dignified salaries and working conditions.
The WFTU joins its voice with DEV-IŞ, its local union EMEK-İŞ, and the workers of EKTAM SOFT DRINKS, demanding the immediate reinstatement of all dismissed workers, stopping the unacceptable anti-union practices, the harassment and threats against struggling workers, and proceeding with a collective agreement that guarantees dignified employment conditions.
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Unions call for strong AI guardrails to protect workers
13 February 2026
The ITUC has raised urgent concerns about the adoption of unregulated artificial intelligence (AI) technologies at an international forum on AI and labour organised by the French Ministry of Labour in Paris. At the forum, representatives of governments, international organisations, multinational companies and social partners met to collectively assess how AI is reshaping the world of work.
A delegation of French, European and international trade unions, including the ITUC, raised urgent concerns about how these technologies are being rolled out:
Fears of job losses and displacement remain widespread, alongside growing risks of work intensification, intrusive surveillance, and the erosion of working conditions.
Major concerns around AI’s hidden labour were also raised. Many of the workers powering these technologies, such as data labellers and content moderators, often work under precarious working conditions, with poor pay and weak protections.
“We cannot accept an AI rollout that delivers private profits while socialising the costs through widespread job losses and deteriorating working conditions. AI must benefit everyone, not just tech billionaires and corporate shareholders.”ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle.
Luc Triangle stressed that AI must be governed in the public interest: “Like previous waves of technological change, AI must be regulated. Policymakers must introduce and enforce strong guardrails to prevent rights violations, discrimination and abuse. And, crucially, unions - as democratic representatives of workers - must have a say in how these technologies are designed, deployed and managed. Technology must work for workers, not against them.”
The conclusions of this forum are expected to influence subsequent international discussions around these technologies, including the forthcoming AI India Action Summit.
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Japanese cabin crew union wins landmark victory on fatigue, safety and union rights
13 February 2026
Japanese cabin crew union wins landmark victory on fatigue, safety and union rights
Japanese cabin crew have won an important legal victory reinforcing a core principle of aviation safety: fatigue protections and rest cannot be sacrificed to commercial pressure and union rights are fundamental to safety too.
“This ruling sends a clear message that commercial pressures on turnaround times and aircraft utilisation cannot come at the expense of safety for passengers or crew,” said Sara Nelson, Chair of ITF’s Civil Aviation Section. “Fatigue is the asbestos of the
aviation industry. Cabin crew are safety professionals first and foremost, and our right to rest is fundamental to keeping passengers safe.”
In a series of rulings involving Jetstar Japan, courts and labour authorities upheld the rights of cabin crew to genuine rest, safe working conditions and freedom from anti-union retaliation.
“The treatment of Jetstar Japan cabin crew exposed here is a safety issue,” Nelson said. “Cabin crew are aviation’s first responders. We rely on them to evacuate us or respond to a medical emergency on board – exhausted crew can’t do that as effectively. Forcing
crew to work excessive hours without real breaks puts everyone at risk.”
The case was brought by the Jetstar Crew Association (JCA) representing cabin crew at Jetstar Japan, with support from ITF- affiliated Kohkuren. During proceedings, it was revealed that cabin crew were routinely forced to work shifts of more than 10 hours across
four domestic flight legs without proper meal breaks or rest.
The Tokyo District Court ruled that Jetstar Japan had violated Japan’s Labour Standards Act and failed in its duty to protect workers’ safety and rights, ordering an injunction to halt the illegal practices. “A ‘break’ under the command and control of the captain
is not a true rest,” the court ruled.
Jetstar argued that short ground turnaround times counted as rest. The court rejected this, noting that cabin crew remain fully engaged in safety checks, cabin cleaning and passenger assistance. In separate decisions, Jetstar Japan was also found to have illegally
imposed new wage contracts and unlawfully disciplined union leaders for legitimate union activity.
“This is exactly why fatigue prevention must be rooted in a just culture in aviation,” Nelson said. “Punitive management systems silence workers, discourage reporting and undermine safety. Unions play a fundamental role in keeping the aviation industry safe
and moving. Unions ensure commercial pressures don’t undermine the safety and wellbeing of the workforce that powers this industry. The courts in Japan have recognised that.”
The ruling echoes findings from the ITF’s 2025 report on cabin crew fatigue, which exposed a global fatigue crisis driven by understaffing, intense turnaround pressures and weak enforcement of rest protections.
“This victory shows what collective action can achieve and why strong unions are essential to protecting workers, passengers and the safety record of airlines themselves. Airlines and regulatory bodies around the world would do well to take note,” said Nelson.
Despite being central to emergency response and passenger safety, cabin crew in Japan are still officially classified as “service personnel” rather than safety professionals.
“This case provides all the argument and recognition necessary to properly and urgently recognise cabin crew as the safety-critical professionals they are,” Nelson concluded.
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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