Taking COSATU Today Forward, 21 July 2026
Norman Mampane
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COSATU TODAY COSATU Call Center Contacts: 010 002 2590 #NationaActionAgainstCostOfLiving Campaign continues… #ClassWar #Cosatu40 #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
21 July 2026
“Build Working Class Unity for Economic Liberation towards Socialism”
Organize at every workplace and demand respect for labour rights Now!
Defend Jobs Now!
Join COSATU NOW!
Contents
- Workers Parliament: Back to Basics!
- 2026 National Employment Equity roadshows debuts in Kimberley and Polokwane this week
- South Africa-#ClassSolidarity!
- Treasury on signing of Development Policy Loan Agreement
International-Workers’ Solidarity!
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Where do we turn in a world without truth?
Future of work in education
Workers’ Parliament-Back2Basics #ClassWar
2026
National Employment Equity roadshows debuts in Kimberley and Polokwane this week
20
July 2026
The
joint national employment equity roadshows/workshops by the Department of Employment and Labour, Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) and the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) to deal with equity issues, ending workplace discrimination,
and enforcing the Employment Equity Act begins this week.
The first 2026 Employment Equity (EE) workshops/roadshows will be held on Tuesday (21 July 2026) in Kimberley, Northern Cape at Horseshoe Inn 101 Memorial Road, Royldene. The second workshop will be held on Thursday (23 July 2026) in Polokwane, Limpopo Province
at – Meropa Casino 59 Prov Roodepoort Street, Ivy Park X14.
Held under the theme: “Bridging the Equity Gap Through Diversity & Inclusion” – the national workshops will end in September 2026.
The 2026 workshops will focus on:
• Presentation on the Draft Amended Code of Good Practice on the preparation, implementation and monitoring of the EE Plan;
• Presentation on practical demonstration of how to utilise the EE System online facilities to capture EE Reports and request EE Certificate of Compliance;
• Presentation on sharing of all types of unfair discrimination cases by the CCMA; and
• Presentation on labour law amendments – Labour Relations Act (LRA), Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA), Employment Equity Act (EEA), National Minimum Wage Act (NMWA)
This year’s national EE workshops/roadshows come a year following the implementation of the Employment Equity Amendment Act, No 4 of 2022 which came into force on 1 January 2025. The new amendments and regulations introduced the setting of five-year sector
EE targets, the enhancement of EE System, how to request EE Certificate of Compliance to be able to conduct business with the State.
The rest of the schedule of 2026 national workshops is as follows:
Mpumalanga
• Mbombela Khayalami Hotel 29 Van Wijk Street (28 July 2026)
North West
• Rustenburg – Orion Safari Hotel, 1 Donkerhoek Road (30 July 2026)
KwaZulu-Natal
• Durban (04 August 2026)
• Pietermaritzburg (06 August 2026)
Western Cape
• Cape Town (11 August 2026)
Eastern Cape
• KuGompo (18 August 2026)
• Gqeberha (20 August 2026)
Gauteng
• Pretoria (25 August 2026)
• Johannesburg (27 August 2026)
Free State
• Bloemfontein (01 September 2026)
The EE workshops are targeted at Employers or Heads of organisations, employees and trade unions, Assigned Senior EE Managers, Consultative EE forum members, Human Resource Managers and Practitioners, Academics, Civil society, and interested stakeholders.
NB: All the workshops will be held from 09:00 to 16:00 and members of the media are invited.
More information on the EE workshops, including updates on the venues to be used, will be available on department’s and the CCMA's social media platform as well as the Department’s website:
www.labour.gov.za
For media inquiries, please contact:
Teboho Thejane
Departmental Spokesperson
082 697 0694/ teboho....@labour.gov.za
-ENDS-
Issued by: Department of Employment and Labour
South Africa #ClassSolidarity
Treasury
on signing of Development Policy Loan Agreement
21
Jul 2026
South Africa and World Bank sign US$1.5 billion Development Policy Loan Agreement to support infrastructure modernization and job creation
The Government of South Africa and the World Bank have signed a US$1.5 billion Development Policy Loan Agreement aimed at supporting South Africa’s efforts to achieve inclusive growth by tackling infrastructure constraints, the primary barrier to job creation.
This serves as the fourth development policy loan and continued partnership with the World Bank and marks a significant step towards addressing South Africa’s pressing economic challenges of low growth and high unemployment.
The loan will help South Africa implement necessary interventions and reforms aimed at advancing reforms in the electricity, freight and logistics sectors, and addressing pressing challenges in the water and sanitation sector. The financing forms part of the
government’s broader efforts for continued momentum on structural reforms in the energy, logistics and water sectors amongst others, reforms which are the foundation of faster and inclusive growth.
The loan support is anchored on three key pillars of structural reform: strengthening energy competitiveness and security, upgrading freight transport services, and delivering efficient water and sanitation services, reforms which are identified to boost growth
and job creation. The financing terms of the loan are in line with the National Treasury’s borrowing strategy that aims to ensure long-term debt sustainability and affordability by raising funding at the lowest cost. Specifically, the loan offers both favourable
interest rate and flexible repayment terms, contributing to minimising the rise in debt service costs.
Financing terms of the World Bank loan offered comprise:
Nominal Value: US$1.5 billion
Maturity: 15 years with 3 year-grace period
Interest rate: 6-month SOFR plus 1.35%
The National Treasury wishes to express its appreciation to the World Bank for its continued partnership and support, which is critical to staying the course and advancing the implementation of historic, timely and critical reforms and South Africa’s overall
development objectives. The World Bank's Development Policy Loan of US$1.5 billion, together with financing secured from other multilateral development partners, has enabled Government to meet its 2026/27 foreign currency borrowing requirement of US$3.2 billion.
Issued by National Treasury
Internationalism-Solidarity
Where do we turn in a world without truth?
Future of work in education
21 July 2026 written by: Gabe Gooding
Facts, truth and wisdom have been concerning me in recent times as we watch AI colonise the world. I fear we are losing our capacity to identify truth as we rush into
a future where the algorithms present us ‘facts’ that may or may not be true.
Once we could reliably turn to the academic literature, the published works of academics, to find the current knowledge on a topic and to trace the process of discovery over time. A work would have been written by scholars, backed by substantial research, and
reviewed by peers before being published. Regardless of the quality of the work, it had been through an identifiable quality control process prior to publication. Our governments and our communities rely on this information to make critical decisions.
But now, in the age of the algorithm we are seeing publications where the work is not guaranteed to be generated by humans. AI is being used to ‘correct’ writing, to compile references, to draw conclusions from data and in some cases to generate data to support
an idea. Apart from a commitment that the ‘person’ presenting the work for publication has made about the content, there is no guarantee anymore that what we read is presenting us facts based on legitimate data.
In Australia we have had union members tell us that their published work has been stripped and the data used in other publications, that they have been cited as authors of work that they didn’t do, and as authors of work that may not even exist. For academics
this is a serious challenge to what is the currency of their career, their publication record and the impact it makes through citations. Not only that, the inherent bias in AI also shows itself here when obviously female names of authors are changed to male
versions. In addition to this, some publishers have not only sold the right to mine their publications to the big tech companies but have also demanded that authors of academic books grant them the right to ‘update’ content at any time. This is not just a
problem in Australia; this is a global phenomenon.
And it leads us to the question: if we can’t rely on the academic literature to provide facts to determine the truth, where will we find it? One of our local solutions is to call on our government to establish a repository of all Australian academic works,
which can be a reliable source of information. Think of it as akin to the seed bank established to preserve the world’s plants, only in this case to preserve research findings, the germs of discovery. This also needs to go hand in hand with the development
of sovereign AI capacity to preserve Australian culture, traditions and language, especially that of the First Nations people of Australia, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The Large Language Models driving generative AI reflect their origin, the values of their developers and the balance of materials available on the internet. As everything is homogenised through GenAI, we risk losing our global diversity. That our students at
all levels are relying on AI and seeing the world through that lens with all its bias is deeply concerning. At the university level where we work, we are seeing the impacts with students losing either the capacity or the will; to reflect on, verify, and critique
the outputs that GenAI is producing for them. We are also seeing a decline in creative and innovative thinking in student responses to assessments.
Over several decades our higher education system has been subject to mass expansion and the commodification of education. We are chronically under-funded, and under-staffed (with first year class sizes of more than 1000 students not uncommon), and our workplaces
are not mentally healthy. Introducing AI into this environment without proper consultation is and was a recipe for disaster, that we are seeing the beginnings of now.
It is beyond comprehension that the current leaders of our universities, the temporary custodians of important institutions with a deep history, are prepared to give away the competitive advantage that they have over Big Tech. The core of a university education
has always been people; the human relationships, the lecturers and tutors who mentor and support, the fellow students with whom you passionately debate ideas, and the opening of your mind to new ideas and ways of assessing those ideas critically. By replacing
staff with chat-bots, by moving all content online so there is no imperative to be physically present, by encouraging the use of AI tools that we know reduce critical thinking skills, and by cracking down on free speech and protest, the universities have been
hollowed out and the experience, once so rich for students, is slowly being impoverished. What is the advantage to being educated on an empty campus when you can get a degree online from BigTech?
Apart from lobbying our government to take steps to protect Australian universities, the current state of research, and the knowledge that will be generated in the future by our students, we are tackling this through collective endeavour. We are currently pursuing
AI clauses in our 50+ collective agreements, that will require: extensive consultation prior to introduction of AI, an identifiable human decision maker when algorithms are used to assess workers, protection of the moral rights of academics, and complete transparency
about the when, where, and how AI us being used by our employer. If AI must be used, it must be used to augment our work not to replace us. This last point is particularly critical for education support personnel who are at the front-line of job losses that
have already begun.
We must do everything we can to ensure we are training a new generation of independent critical thinkers through meaningful human interactions, to protect the global knowledge base now and into the future, to, and ultimately, to protect facts and support truth.
______________________________
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