Political unity of the working class is essential
THIS year’s International Workers’ Day is the second since the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic was announced, followed by global lockdown measures aimed at curbing it. The results thus far show that the working people of the world have suffered the most from the pandemic and its consequences. It is thus clear that the pandemic has not at all affected everyone equally, and neither has it been class neutral.
In countries such as South Africa, the pandemic has worsened the preexisting economic and social crisis indicated by a long period of stagnation, frequent recessions, growing unemployment, mass poverty, and astronomical inequality.
These and other conditions of the crisis do not affect every person and class equally. Black people are the worst affected in South Africa, with women and the youth in yet another worst position. Our people in overcrowded townships, such as Alexandra, in squatter camps, in rural areas, are yet another big working-class and poor population that this the worst affected.
Rather than just a global health crisis, we are amid a deep-rooted capitalist system economic crisis and its consequent multiple social systems and political crises. The capitalist system pandemic, economic and social crises demand maximum unity of workers beyond union and federation affiliation. Broadly, maximum political unity of the working class is essential.
This unity of organised workers, which should expand to organising the disorganised to build a united, formidable progressive trade union unity, must be aimed against retrenchments, unemployment, inequality, and poverty as well as the results of these factors which include gender-based violence and criminality generally.
Strengthening the alliance between the SACP and Cosatu is an important imperative to build wider trade union unity based upon strengthening the federation and its affiliates including paying greater attention to industrial unions while continuing to grow public sector unions.
This is also essential for the wider popular Left front pushing the national democratic revolution into a second radical phase, advance, deepen and defend it towards creating work for unemployed workers, lifting the poor out of poverty, systematically tackling inequality, and confronting the related crisis of many working-class households unable to make ends meet, to support life itself.
Retrenchments, the worst crisis to hit employed workers, have played a great part in increasing unemployment.
In South Africa, the unemployment rate stands at 32.5% by the narrow or official definition that excludes demoralised work-seekers. However, the total unemployment by the expanded definition that takes them into account is 42.6%.
Capitalist employers have taken advantage of the pandemic to shed workers from employment while raking in super profits. If Neo-liberalism with its inherent austerity measures can deepen further, the crises of unemployment, inequality and poverty will worsen. Workers must increase their level of consciousness to fight against Neo-liberalism and its austerity agenda, but not limiting themselves within trade union consciousness. Broader working-class consciousness must be aimed at the removal of the root of the problem, capitalism.
One of the negative impacts on workers of the pandemic has been the prolongation of the working day, with workers working at home constantly “on call” and thus expected to work throughout the day, often through the internet without the state’s regulation of the working period each day.
Also, while performing that work, the workers use their own electricity, water, homes as the workplace, etcetera, without their capitalist bosses paying for those costs.
A part of the cost of production has been pushed upon workers’ shoulders. Many teleworkers are being asked to work from home with little support for setting up a workstation.
The working class must also strengthen the fight for a health-care system that prioritises the people, ensure that people are the centre of focus in the vaccination drive against Covid-19, and not profits.
The undermining collective bargaining in the public and private sectors demands that the SACP and Cosatu intensify the struggle against this Neo-liberal agenda.
Workers’ demands today, ranging from health and safety, decent work, and better living conditions, remain generally similar to those of the workers in 1889 when they chose the date of International Workers’ Day.
At that time, the fight for an eighthour working day was one of the key priorities. In the broader political arena, the development of the world has necessitated that workers wage relentless struggles against imperialism, including Covid-19 vaccine imperialism.