The latest alarming Oxfam International Inequality Report should act to unite the working class
23 January 2018
The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted the latest Oxfam International Inequality Report that reveals that the rich are getting richer, while the poor are sinking further and further into the cesspool of poverty. The contents of this report are gloomy and depressing and confirm what we already know that the economic situation of the working class is not getting better.
We now know from the last report released by Statistics South Africa that more than half of the South African population live in poverty. In fact, the number of people living in extreme poverty (i.e. persons living below the 2015 Food Poverty Line of R441 per person per month) has increased by 2,8 million, to nearly 14 million. Women, children and the elderly are the hardest hit by poverty. This reality of the deepening and widening poverty was also confirmed by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), which reported that ‘in per capita terms South Africans are poorer than they were in 2014’.
The capitalist crisis in the world economy has remained intense, deep and prolonged. It 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. This capitalist crisis has driven down standards of living and the livelihoods of millions of people throughout the world. Unemployment has risen and wages remains depressed. Although often coated with relatively short-lived, anaemic, upward or recovery cycles, all major western economies are experiencing a long downward drag.
According to a recent report by the IMF, “the global pickup in activity that started in the second half of 2016 gained further momentum in the first half of 2017”. But as workers we know that in both economic boom and crisis, it is the bosses that benefit and the workers that suffer. Obviously ,according to this latest Oxfam report it is the global 1% that has benefited out of this modest growth, and this includes the Apartheid oligarchy here at home.