Today's Labour News

The Citizen writes that while Cosatu and its affiliated unions plan to embark on a nationwide strike in defence of workers’ rights on Thursday.

The trade union federation indicated that the marches would take place across major urban centres in all nine provinces. Noting that this would be a protected strike, Cosatu’s Matthew Parks explained: “It is a demonstration by workers that government needs to do more to end the current levels of load shedding, cable theft, crime and corruption, wasteful expenditure and austerity cuts crippling the state, suffocating the economy and further plunging workers into high levels of indebtedness and misery. This is also a signal to the government, the Reserve Bank, and the commercial banks that the working class can no longer afford to bear the burden of rising levels of inflation, electricity tariff hikes and relentless and reckless increases in the repo rate.” But political analyst Professor André Duvenhage said although people were right in arguing that the country was mismanaged and there was no proper economic growth, strikes would take the country’s economy down even more than was the case in the past. Cosatu said the steps that could be taken to alleviate pressure on employees and uplift the economy included: raising the R350 social relief of distress grant to the food poverty line in the October medium-term budget policy statement; extending the Presidential Employment Stimulus to accommodate a million active participants in October and two million next February; ensuring the implementation of the two pot pension reforms next March; urgently intervening to prevent the collapse and liquidation of the Post Office; and filling all funded public service and sector vacancies by December.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Lunga Simelane at The Citizen (subscriber access only)

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