UPM Statement on Unemployment Crisis

[UPM media]

Unemployment: Social and Climate Crisis Crushing Humanity

Media Statement
Date: 31 July 2019

Statistics South Africa released another shocking unemployment rate for this quarter. The unemployment rate stands at 29%, more than 9 million people fit for work unemployed.

Unemployment means loss of one’s humanity. It is crushing us. Unemployment has turned our townships into war zones, they have been taken over by drug lords and gangsters. Cape flats in Cape Town is but one glaring example.

Many communities are left without water for weeks, dry taps in scorching temperatures. We are feeling the impacts of climate change - South Africa is experiencing one of the harshest droughts in our time. There is evidence that much of the water shortage is due to a corrupt government. Food prices are also soaring while retailers are recording high profits. Hunger is everywhere. Women are carrying this burden in poor homes.

Unemployment means no water, no food and loss of dignity. It forfeits citizenship and our rights to life. It crushes our humanity and that of future generations. This is a failure of the ANC Afro neoliberal class project which gives more power to capital, rather than workers and the poor.

The ANC is at war with itself. Fighting back against ‘looters’, without fighting racialized inequality and addressing a worsening climate crisis, at the same time, is reactionary. Yes we stand against corruption but also its root causes. No one in the ANC led Alliance is untainted by the anti-worker and anti-poor choices made over the past two decades. No one in the ANC led Alliance has a plans to emancipate the historically oppressed black majority. They have failed black people in general.

The jobs summit was a farce. A jobs summit with bosses and labour bureaucrats who invest workers money in the private sector and who have turned working class unions into business unions is a cruel joke. Those who are being crushed, the unemployed, were invisible. The unemployed were not given voice!

The Unemployed People’s Movement is aligned with the #ClimateJusticeCharter process. We have participated in its forums and will continue being part of its assemblies and struggles against carbon capital so we advance people led just transitions, from below, to realise the following alternatives for our people:

Investment of workers’ pension money in worker cooperatives, socially owned renewable energy in and education in our communities
 A National Basic Income Grant;
 Socially owned renewable energy for every household, community and municipality;
 Food Sovereignty pathways to feed every community, village, town and city
 Climate Jobs that are descent and zero carbon
 Free and safe water for all
 Government built eco-houses and liveable communities with libraries, cultural infrastructure, training spaces and support infrastructure like crèches

We have had enough of failed national liberation leaders!

We want justice, dignity and a future for the majority!

Unemployed People's Movement

Sikhumbuzo Soxujwa – 0786764804
Thami Hukwe - 0623090468