Taking COSATU Today Forward, 20 June 2025
Norman Mampane
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COSATU TODAY Today, it’s #CosatuRedFridays #CosatuCallCentre number is 010 022 2590 #DecentWork #DecentLives #SACTU70 #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
20 June 2025
“Build Working Class Unity for Economic Liberation towards Socialism”
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Contents
- Workers Parliament: Back to Basics!
- Media Alert: POPCRU Restore Dignity March
- Media Accreditation Opens for NUM 18th National Elective Congress, 24-26 June 2025
- South Africa
- COSATU commends PIC's reaching an historic R3 trillion milestone
- COSATU urges swift action by government to stave off a pending July fuel hike
- International-Workers’ Solidarity!
- "SACP denounces imperialist-controlled foreign currency debt accumulation path" - Party statement on recent World Bank loan
- WFTU Call for Intensifying Mobilization Against Imperialist and Zionist Aggression
Workers’ Parliament-Back2Basics
Media Alert: POPCRU Restore Dignity March
Richard Mamabolo, POPCRU National Spokesperson, 19 June 2025
The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) will be embarking on a Restore Dignity March as part of its ongoing campaign to defend workers' rights, uphold human dignity within the criminal justice cluster, and demand decisive action against systemic injustices affecting members in the South African Police Service and Correctional Services.
This comes in light of the many misconducts and allegations of sexual exploitations at SAPS training facilities and in workplaces in general.
We strongly condemn any and all forms of sexual harassment in the workplace. As an organisation representing workers within the criminal justice cluster, we further affirm our unwavering commitment to protecting the rights, safety, and dignity of our members.
Sexual harassment is a serious violation of human rights and a gross abuse of power. It undermines the work environment, affects morale, and hinders the effective functioning of our institutions.
POPCRU views such behaviour as intolerable and unacceptable, regardless of rank or position.
Details of the March:
• *Date: Tuesday, 24 June 2025*
• *Time: 08h00*
• *Meeting Point: Burgers Park, Pretoria*
• *Route: March to the Shorburg Building, 429 Helen Joseph Street, Pretoria*
• *Purpose: Handing over of a Memorandum of Demands to the National Police Commissioner*
• *Keynote Speaker: POPCRU President, Cde Thulani Ngwenya*
This mobilisation forms a critical part of the broader Restore Dignity Campaign, a drive aimed at confronting injustice, promoting ethical leadership, and ensuring fair labour practices across the security cluster.
POPCRU calls on all members and affected communities to stand together in solidarity and action as we demand accountability, transformation, and respect for the dignity of our officers and correctional workers.
Media is hereby invited.
Issued by POPCRU
For more information contact Richard Mamabolo on 066 135 4349
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Media
Accreditation Opens for NUM 18th National Elective Congress, 24-26 June 2025
Livhuwani
Mammburu, NUM National Spokesperson,
17 June 2025
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) invites members of the media to apply for accreditation for its 18th National Elective Congress, taking place from 24-26 June 2025.
The Congress will be held at the Birchwood Hotel and Conference Centre in Boksburg.
This year's Congress is organised under the theme: “The Epoch for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Now Or Never.”
The Congress will serve as a critical platform to debate the challenges confronting workers in the mining, construction, energy and metal sectors. It will also address the current political and economic landscape in South Africa.
Distinguished delegates will include leaders from the Congress of South African
Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Communist Party (SACP), the African National Congress (ANC), and other fraternal organisations from South Africa and abroad.
Accreditation Details: Members of the media who wish to cover the Congress must apply for accreditation by submitting their full name, ID number, and the name of their media house to the officials listed below.
The deadline for accreditation applications is Friday, 21 June 2025.
A detailed programme will be distributed to all accredited journalists closer to the date.
For accreditation and further information, please contact:
Livhuwani Mammburu NUM National Spokesperson Cell: 083 809 3257 Email: mamm...@gmail.com
Luphert Chilwane NUM Media Officer Cell: 083 809 3255 Email: lchi...@num.org.za
The National Union of Mineworkers
7
Rissik Street. Cnr Frederick
Johannesburg
Tel: 011 377 2111
Cell: 083 809 3257
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COSATU rejects with disdain the CEO of BLSA's shocking attack on workers' constitutional and labour rights
Matthew Parks, COSATU Parliamentary Coordinator, 20 June 2025
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) rejects with utter disdain the Chief Executive Officer of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA), Ms. Busisiwe Mavuso’s shocking attack on Transnet’s employees, and in fact all workers’ hard won constitutional rights to unionise and collective bargaining in her “weekly newsletter”.
If BLSA did not claim to speak on behalf of Organised Business and represent an important stakeholder at Nedlac, we would be content to dismiss these as odd rantings best ignored.
Unfortunately, they represent a shameful call to government to not only undermine Transnet’s employees’ fundamental constitutional and labour rights but are an incitement to the state to break the law.
Ms. Mavuso is aggrieved that unions at Transnet, SATAWU and UNTU, have represented their members, utilised legally established collective bargaining procedures provided for by the Labour Relations Act and negotiated with their employer and signed a three-year wage agreement, including 6% for the current year.
Yet this is precisely what unions are meant to do!
The BLSA CEO is horrified by the unions’ temerity for negotiating a CPI plus 1.5% increase. Again, the horrors! Ms. Mavuso seems strangely unfamiliar with the nature of wage negotiations and how inflation is calculated for these. Union mandates from workers are to protect wages from being eroded by inflation.
The inflation rate utilised is for the previous year, which in this case was 4.5%. Negotiations take into account that inflation hits low-income workers hardest as the goods they spend their wages on increase at levels far above CPI, e.g. electricity, petrol and food.
No doubt Ms. Mavuso negotiated similar increases for herself.
Ms. Mavuso has demanded government reign in the unions at Transnet and suppress workers’ rights to collective bargaining. It is beyond hypocritical that BLSA sees fit to extol the virtues of the Constitution and demand its full protection for the rights of business owners but abandons any sense of principled leadership when it comes to demanding the same respect for workers’ constitutional rights.
Whilst the BLSA CEO’s comments are offensive to workers, the more worrying aspect would be if government were not led by a sober President and Ministers for Transport, Employment and Labour, and this inflammatory call to violate the Constitution were acted upon by government, Transnet or other employers.
It would deny workers’ their rights to negotiate solutions to their needs and threaten labour market stability.
A business leader with experience in creating and running successful enterprises would appreciate that staff are any workplaces’ most important asset and a happy, respected employee is the key to their success. A worker whose rights are abused and their need for a living wage suppressed will not be productive. Active unions which represent workers and help find solutions to grievances are key to labour market stability.
One imagined the CEO of BLSA would be familiar with the many success stories of partnerships between Organised Business and COSATU, and indeed Organised Labour, at Nedlac and in numerous joint interventions to save local jobs and businesses.
In the past few years these social compacts between COSATU and Organised Business have seen the Edcon deal to save 140 000 clothing and retail jobs, the Eskom debt relief package to enable it to end loadshedding, the UIF COVID-19 TERS releasing R65 billion to help 5.7 million workers, numerous buy local campaigns, engagements to extend the AGOA favourable tariff access to South African and African exports to the United States, and more recently the Two-Pot Pension reforms putting R44 billion into the pockets of 2.4 million workers.
It is a pity BLSA’s CEO chose to scapegoat workers at Transnet for its problems yet seemingly has little knowledge of the challenges facing this critical State-Owned Enterprise and thus the solutions required.
It is not workers who unleashed the decade of state capture and corruption at this SOE, nor is it workers who run the sophisticated copper and other metals syndicates stripping its infrastructure.
Neither is it workers who appointed incompetent management, nor neglected investments in its infrastructure and machinery. It’s not workers who negotiated the dodgy deal with Chinese railway corporations that were then ensnared in outstanding taxes and a reneging of commitments to supply spare parts and repairs.
Fixing these is precisely what needs to be done to stablise and rebuild Transnet, not dumping the bill for state capture and mismanagement upon workers struggling to cope with the rising costs of living and take care of their families and unemployed relatives.
It would be more productive if the CEO of BLSA took time to engage unions on the challenges facing workers and solutions to turning the economy around. It would be equally refreshing for Ms. Mavuso to use her pedestal to ask why her private sector constituents are content 31 years into democracy for 60% plus senior management positions to be held by White men, who constitute less than 4% of society.
It would be inspiring if BLSA could provide their plan to address the obscene apartheid wage gap deeply entrenched across the private sector where CEOs of mining, banking, financial, retail and other companies make more in a day then many of their employees make in a year!
Perhaps as we prepare for the National Dialogue, BLSA will swap this ill-considered rant by their CEO for some long overdue introspection.
Issued by COSATU
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COSATU commends PIC's reaching an historic R3 trillion milestone
Matthew Parks, COSATU Parliamentary Coordinator, 19 June 2025
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) commends the Public Investment Corporation (PIC)’s reaching an historic R3 trillion milestone. The PIC is not only the largest investment fund in South Africa but the entire continent. The PIC has not only seen remarkable growth over the past year from R2.7 trillion in assets to R3 trillion today, but from R1.8 trillion during the COVID-19 pandemic when it experienced a massive slump like all other investment funds. This is an impressive achievement under government led by the African National Congress.
We are heartened by the efforts of the PIC to tackle corruption and state capture. During the decade of ignominy, it was one of the sites of state capture and brazen looting on an industrial scale. Whilst we welcome its efforts to deal with corruption, more must be done to ensure that the PIC’s assets are secured from the cancer of pilferage.
Many forget that the PIC assets belong to workers with approximately 87% from the Government Employees’ Pension Fund, 7% from the Unemployment Insurance Fund and 3% from the Compensation of Occupational Injuries and Diseases Fund, amongst others.
It is sacrosanct that at all times the PIC invests and manages these funds, workers’ hard earned monies, in a manner that expands and enables them to fulfill their legislative mandates of allowing public servants to retire in security and comfort, to provide relief to workers who’ve lost their jobs or support them whilst they are on maternity, parental or adoption leave; as well as to compensate workers’ whose health and lives have suffered in the course of their occupations.
It is equally important that the PIC invests these funds in ways that fulfill the objectives stipulated by the PIC Act, to support local economic development, nurture emerging sectors, create decent jobs, boost export industries, expands economic infrastructure, and champion sustainable development.
The PIC must ramp up investments in support of South Africa’s economic growth and efforts to take it to the badly needed 3% plus target.
Whilst appreciating the efforts by the PIC to shut out the lecherous hands of those who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of workers and their funds, it must remain hyper vigilant to these realities and do more as this cancer of corruption has not disappeared altogether and remains an ever-present threat to workers, the nation and the programme of renewal.
COSATU will continue to work closely with the PIC in this journey.
Issued by COSATU
International-Solidarity
"SACP denounces imperialist-controlled foreign currency debt accumulation path" - Party statement on recent World Bank loan
Mbulelo Mandlana, SACP Head of Media, Communications and Information Thursday, 12 June 2025
The South African Communist Party (SACP) denounces the National Treasury’s decision, announced on 9 June 2025, to contract a new US$1.5 billion (approximately R28 billion) foreign-currency loan from the World Bank. This decision deepens our country’s subordination to imperialist-controlled global finance capital, reinforcing a neo-colonial debt regime that erodes national, undermines democratic development and threatens the interests of the working class.
The imperialist-controlled foreign currency denominated debt exposes South Africa to external shocks over which the country has no control. When the rand depreciates, the cost of repaying these loans soars, draining public finances. The National Treasury uses this to entrench austerity by presenting itself and the budgets it tables annually in Parliament as concerned about the debt-to-GDP ratio, while its accumulation of foreign currency-denominated debt, instead of sustainable and development-oriented debt in rand, exposes South Africa to severer debt conditions.
Even though our economy is based on rands, imperialist-controlled foreign currency-denominated debt must be serviced in imperialist-controlled currency, which is governed by imperialist-controlled monetary policy, with all the domestic currency exposure to the risk of depreciation. What makes the National Treasury’s obsession with imperialist-controlled foreign currency debt accumulation even more problematic is the fact that South Africa has deep domestic capital pools. These could and should be harnessed to fund public infrastructure and state-led development.
Instead, the National Treasury has once again chosen a colonial-type path of subordinate dependence to imperialist-controlled capital, which comes at the cost of our democratic national sovereignty and economic emancipation. Historically, dating back at least to the 1970s, the regime of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank loans – especially through their conditionalities – has undermined domestic economic policy sovereignty in many Global South countries.
In nearly every case where domestic economic policy has been shaped by IMF and World Bank conditionalities or associated policy measures, underdevelopment has persisted. Large sections of the population in these countries continue to live in conditions of poverty, mass unemployment, and widening domestic and global inequality. Through their loan conditionalities, among others, the IMF and World Bank have functioned as instruments of the imperialist regime, enforcing neo-liberal policy prescriptions. Where their loans are involved, the agenda is, more often than not, a neo-liberal one.
Treasury justifies this latest foreign loan on the basis of modernising energy and freight infrastructure. However, these so-called structural reforms are in fact an extension of the neo-liberal restructuring of our state and economy. The so-called Just Energy Transition Investment Plan is neither just nor a real transition. It is a capitalist-driven offensive against state participation in the economy and public ownership.
According to Eskom’s own schedule, Komati Power Station was fully decommissioned by 31 October 2022. Publicly owned power stations decommissioning was scheduled for Camden, Hendrina, Grootvlei and Arnot between 2023 and 2031.
According to the Integrated Resource Plan 2019, the government chose a path to decommission 5,400 megawatts of Eskom-generated electricity by 2022, 10,500 megawatts of Eskom-generated electricity by 2030 and a staggering 35,000 megawatts of Eskom-generated electricity by 2050.
The shutdown of publicly owned electric power generation capacity takes place without any major plan to establish new, modern, publicly owned electric power generation capacity. This is nothing short of a structural attack on state participation in energy production.
It is unacceptable that the democratic government is presiding over the destruction of state ownership and participation in electric power generation, when even colonial and apartheid regimes, albeit to serve the interests of their beneficiaries as opposed to everyone because they were racist, ensured that power generation remained under public control.
Under democracy, when the state must be protecting public property rights and building greater levels of public ownership and state participation in the economy in line with the Freedom Charter to serve all on a non-racial and non-sexist basis, the people as whole – of whom the working class is the majority – are now being stripped of their rightful public assets and handed over to private capital under the guise of a “just energy transition”. This directly contradicts the Freedom Charter, which declares that “monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”.
Instead of strengthening, modernising and expanding state ownership in energy, rail, ports and other critical network infrastructure, such as water, the leading fellows at the helm of the state view and use the government as an instrument of the profit-driven private sector interests, including private power producers and rail operators. This amounts to a new form of privatisation, one that masks itself as structural reform and sustainability but is rooted in neo-liberal dogma. The shift from a producer state to a tender state, where the state’s role is reduced to buying services and goods such as electricity from private capital, is a betrayal of the liberation struggle.
Not unrelated, the South African Reserve Bank is constitutionally mandated to function in the interest of ensuring balanced and sustainable growth in the Republic, yet it has consistently failed – and continues to fail – in meeting this constitutional imperative. Rather than acting as a vehicle for transformation and development, and the mobilisation and deployment of domestic resources to ensure balanced and sustainable growth in the Republic, the central bank has embraced a neo-liberal monetarist framework that serves more the interests of finance capital. This has left working-class needs unmet and is part and parcel of the context under which South Africa is in the middle of the long-term interrelated crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality. This must come to an end.
The SACP calls for an immediate halt to the dangerous path of imperialist-controlled foreign currency debt dependency and neo-liberal policies, including, but not limited to, privatisation and austerity.
We call on Parliament, trade unions, youth and student formations, and progressive civil society to reject this neo-liberal path, oppose the destruction of Eskom, and demand a developmental path anchored in public ownership and people’s power.
The liberation struggle was fought for genuine freedom, including economic emancipation. That struggle continues. Let us defend and deepen public ownership, reject neo-liberalism and build a socialist future.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY,
FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA.
Media, Communications & Information Department | MCID
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WFTU Call for Intensifying Mobilization Against Imperialist and Zionist Aggression
19 June 2025
After Israel's military attack against Iran with the direct participation of the USA and the support of NATO, the EU and other allies, the effort to impose imperialist plans for the wider Middle East region is rapidly escalating and seriously threatening world peace and security.
Every principle of International Law is brutally violated by the murderous and terrorist State of Israel and its powerful allies, using the power of arms, spearheaded by the Israeli military machine, as a means to impose plans that serve imperialist geo-strategic and economic interests against the peoples of the region, thus bringing humanity once again before the threat of a wider war with incalculable consequences for the peoples of the world.
The only force that can stop this painful course and put an end on imperialist and Zionist aggression is the reaction and resistance of the peoples with the working class in the front line.
For the progressive, anti-imperialist forces in the world today it is an urgent duty to defend the life and benefits of the people, the peace threatened by imperialist aggression.
The WFTU has from the very first moment clearly and unequivocally condemned the aggression of the murderous Israeli state. We are proud that under the banners of our Federation millions of workers around the world have mobilized and are mobilizing in solidarity with the people of Palestine for a free Palestine and an independent Palestinian state.
In these crucial moments when the flame of war caused by imperialist and Zionist aggression is widening and spreading, the WFTU calls on its members and friends to intensify their mobilisation in solidarity with the Palestinian people, the people of Iran, Lebanon and the other peoples of the region who are suffering the consequences of imperialist aggression.
All of us with one voice demand:
- Stop immediately the genocide of the Palestinian people and the attack on Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
- No to the warmongers who ignite the flames of war and threaten the peoples for their geostrategic and economic interests
- Yes to peace and nuclear disarmament for all
- Freedom for Palestine
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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