The Citizen reports that “End poverty” and “High electricity pricing kill the poor” were just some of the slogans on placards of Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) members who marched to the Department of Trade and Industry on Friday to hand in a memorandum lamenting the high cost of living.

The members handed over a memorandum of demands to a representative of the ministers of public enterprises, finance, minerals and energy and employment and labour. The memorandum highlighted the impact of the fuel price increases, high transport costs and unemployment, poverty and the electricity crisis. John Sithole said he was fed up with the government: “We are not suffering, we are dying. You talk about budgeting; we don’t even know what that is. We don’t have money to budget because we are not working. It’s a problem: the water, electricity and the petrol.” He added that South Africans wanted to work, but not for peanuts. “There are people who go for cheap labour. It’s not that we don’t want to work, but we know what we are worth,” he stated. Sithole said his children, who completed school in 2016 and 2017, were also unemployed.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Marizka Coetzer at The Citizen

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page