Statement on the Nehawu strike

10 March 2023

The South African Communist Party (SACP) pledges its solidarity with the members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu), who have peacefully embarked upon their collective bargaining strike starting this week. We denounce the right-wing propaganda involving the use of allegations of violence associated with isolated incidents to tar all the striking Nehawu members with the same brush and to condemn both the entire strike and union as violent. The SACP encourages the workers to maintain the peaceful character of the strike and deepen their unity in pursuit of their legitimate collective bargaining demands.      

Instead of using the medium-term budget policy statements and annual national budgets to suppress improvements in the employment and working conditions of public servants, the government must negotiate with the workers in good faith. As things stand, however, the government is pursuing a commitment to curtail the “public wage bill” or “compensation of employees”. Not unrelated, the workers were badly affected when the government reneged from implementing agreed upon salary increases in the last year of the three-year public service collective bargaining agreement signed in 2018.

The SACP calls upon public service trade unions to unite behind the common interests of the workers and common strategies to achieve their aims. We will continue with and deepen our efforts to build and strengthen unity in the ranks of the progressive trade union movement and the working-class at large. A powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor, over and above wider trade union unity, is essential to the success of the struggle to achieve the immediate interests and ultimate goals of the working-class. 

Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Central Committee and Political Bureau Member, SACP, 10 March 2023