Unity key to overcome unemployment
THE current economic crisis reflects an inability of the bourgeois class forces to find a resolution to the systemic and deep existential crisis of the capitalist system.
The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened an already bad situation. This economic crisis is primarily borne out of contradictions of capitalism, in which production is social and the fruits of labour are appropriated privately by a handful of people.
We are witnessing not just the concentration of capital and wealth in the hands of a few; but the financialisaton of the economy due to the systemic and chronic stagnation of the productive sectors of the economy; and the systematic attack on the social functions of the State that have been achieved through struggle of the workers and peoples.
In South Africa, the capitalist crisis has driven down standards of living and the livelihoods of millions of people. Unemployment has risen, wages remain depressed, and our economy has been experiencing a long downward drag.
The working class has been confronted by the challenges of access to quality public health, education, transport, , and other issues. Despite being the majority of the population, it has been reduced to the status of passive recipients of ever shrinking state grants and other services such as free housing precisely because of its hopeless and miserable socio-economic conditions that do not allow it to afford the basic necessities of life. As poverty increases, so does class and social inequality grow.
The government’s approach to economic transformation is focused on the integration of few black elites into the economic structures of ownership while leaving these structures unchanged.
This integrationist strategy that does not tamper with the capitalist logic of accumulation means that workers cannot look to the government to defend and liberate it from this economic quagmire.
In fact, the government’s response to this crisis has been to impose extreme sacrifices on the workers. Structural adjustments are being imposed under the guise of managing our national debt and a neo-liberal re-engineering is put in place and intensified to achieve bigger aims than to simply deal with the national debt and Covid-19 crisis.
Workers are being retrenched at an alarming rate, collective bargaining is under attack and government austerity cuts have resulted in the defunding of critical social services and strategic labour market institutions.
Experience in other countries has
taught us that the elite have often succeeded in their offensive against the workers where unions are weak and fractured, mostly over narrow sectarian differences.
Currently, there are 205 trade unions and 24 trade unions federations registered with the Department of Labour and they are organising only about 26% of the workforce.
Cosatu’s membership stands at around 1.8 million, and about 2.4 million other “organised” workers belong to non-Cosatu affiliated unions. This is gravely worrying and should make all unions and labour federations pause and reflect because it means that almost 10 million workers are “disorganised” in South Africa. This speaks
NEWS 24/7 to the fragmentation and sectarianism of the trade union movement.
The current economic developments should send a clear message to the working class that sectarianism and fragmentation are not options or solutions any longer.
The unity of the working class, starting with the organised component of the trade union movement, is important during this critical period. Trade unions should abandon their narrow sectarian differences and start to co-operate and work together.
At this critical juncture, the strategic task of the working class and its leading detachment in the trade union movement is to effectively mobilise around a more radical programme to overcome growing unemployment, obscene inequality, and mass poverty in a context of the current economic crisis.
This includes working together to develop an elaborate strategy to build working class power inside and outside the workplace.
There is a need for trade unions to unite with a range of mass formations organising students, women, religious groups, and the youth to among other things build and strengthen working class power in society. Permanent mobilisation of the working class and the poor, through variety of organisations is necessary to build capacity and momentum against this working class onslaught.
The present crisis of capitalism and the crisis of hegemony neoliberalism provide a conducive climate for the mass organisations to engage in wider debates on the question of an alternative economic model to stand up to and replace neo-liberalism and the “free market”.
Starting with the deadlock in the public service wage negotiations, unions and social organisations should respond with militancy and programmes of the mass-line. This will mean embarking on sustained acts of civil disobedience. This also includes mass picketing; sympathy strikes and solidarity rallies embracing the widest sections of workers both in the public and the private sector.
Workers need to work together to send a message to the existing power structure that they are fed up and they have had enough.
The solution is to unite and work together to dismantle the current system of power through mobilisation because sitting down and allowing narrow differences to continue to cause divisions amongunions is traitorous and suicidal. It is tantamount to accepting the death sentence that is handed to workers by the political and business power structure.