BL Premium reports that Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi has urged members to campaign for the governing party in the local government election in spite of the legal battles the trade union federation is fighting with the ANC-led government over wages.
In her opening address at Cosatu’s central committee meeting on Monday, Losi warned that if elected to govern, the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) would scrap all progressive labour laws enacted by the ANC. Relations between the two allies have been strained of late with the federation taking the ANC-led government to court over its unwillingness to implement the final leg of a three-year wage agreement signed at the bargaining council in 2018. On 24 August its public sector unions approached the Constitutional Court to challenge the 2020 ruling by the Labour Appeal Court that upheld a Treasury decision not to conclude the public sector deal due to a lack of money. “We are all disappointed with the behaviour of many of our comrades in government. But let us not delude ourselves into thinking that workers will be better off with the ANC defeated. The DA will scrap all our progressive labour laws, including the national minimum wage that has improved the wages of 6-million workers,” Losi said. The ANC has always depended on Cosatu’s grassroots structures to win national elections. Losi, a key ally of President Cyril Ramaphosa, called on Cosatu to “force” municipalities to deliver on their mandates to provide basic services to communities, tackle corruption and the outsourcing of services, and pay workers on time. The DA’s shadow minister of employment and labour, Michael Cardo, said it was extraordinary that Cosatu should continue to support the ANC given the party’s failures in government.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Luyolo Mkentane at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
- Read too, Cosatu to back ANC in municipal polls but opposed to mandatory vaccination, at Independent Media
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