The task of the trade union movement in the current period

SACP Message to workers on May Day 2012

Over the past weeks, the organized labour movement in SA, led by COSATU, has once more demonstrated its massive power, its capacity to impact dramatically and decisively on key social issues that affect the workers and poor of our country.

The SACP salutes COSATU, the ANC, and government for seeking a united way out of the crisis that has been provoked by the e-Toll project in Gauteng. Thursday's announcement follows the massive demonstration of worker power in the general strike of March 7^th. On that day the SACP marched shoulder to shoulder with COSATU and its affiliates to express our shared concerns about the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, and our shared hatred of the role played by labour brokers, these modern day slave-traders.

Of course, we must remember that a postponement of e-tolling is exactly that - just a postponement. Following this past weekend's court judgment, that postponement will now have been considerably more than one month. The delay gives us some more space as the Tripartite Alliance to find a united way forward. It is absolutely essential that we do now unite ourselves - otherwise we will abandon this issue to the DA, AfriForum, the Automobile Association and other essentially right-wing, middle-class interest groups.

So how do we move forward together to provide progressive leadership on the e-Toll crisis?  

Let's first remind ourselves about the background to the e-Toll crisis. The idea of a multi-billion rand widening and expanding of the freeway system in Gauteng was first pushed in the early 2000s by a group of former ANC Gauteng politicians. They were in league with narrow BEE entrepreneurs, and big capital - both local and foreign. It was basically the same group who also pushed for the multi-billion rand Gautrain project. Most of the former ANC Gauteng leaders involved in these projects were part and parcel of the 1996 class project; some of them went on to join COPE.

Neither the Gautrain nor the Freeway Project were concerned with addressing the transport problems confronting the working class and poor in Gauteng. They were projects essentially directed at making profits at public expense. Insofar as social needs were considered, it was the needs of upper and middle-income earners in Gauteng that were given priority.

The Gautrain, which cost R27bn, and which is still costing the Gauteng province some R300m a year in ridership guarantees doesn't go anywhere near any of the major townships of Gauteng - Soweto, Orange Farm, Mamelodi, or Shoshanguve. When it DOES come close to a Tembisa or an Alexandra, it does its best to skip around them. It is focused on white suburbs and business districts.

With the R27bn plus we have spent on the Gautrain we could, instead, have made a huge impact on improving bus services, Metrorail services, and township and rural access roads throughout SA. And we could have created local jobs, instead of jobs in the UK.

It was essentially the SAME group of tenderpreneurs who championed the Gautrain project who also championed the Gauteng e-Toll project. And once again the patterns are the same. In fact, in a recent count by the Department of Transport, it was found that only 2% of the vehicles on the e-Toll roads are buses and minibuses. So these freeways are basically used by trucks and especially by private cars.

And when we talk about car ownership - it is important to remember that even in Gauteng, the richest province by far in SA, almost 70% of households don't have any access to a car. These households are reliant on public transport - on taxis, buses and Metrorail, for their basic mobility. And we all know that very often our current public transport is not reliable, it is often not safe, and on weekends or for a late shift it is often non-existent.

For these reasons, in the townships of Gauteng, as in many other parts of SA, you will find working class families who cannot really afford a car...but because of the long distances to work and amenities, and because of weak public transport...they also cannot afford NOT to have a car.  

COSATU and the SACP objections to the e-Toll Freeway project are NOT the same as those of the DA, or AfriForum, or the car-hire companies. These freeways are basically an infrastructure used and enjoyed by an overwhelming majority of middle and upper-middle income earners. The DA and its friends are NOT objecting to the fact that R20bn of our scarce public resources have been spent on their Gauteng infrastructure. They just don't want to pay for it themselves.

For the Tripartite Alliance partners we cannot just leave our objections to objections about paying the tolls. We have to define and defend the interests of the workers and poor in relation to public transport and the fact that workers stay far away from their work places or areas of economic activity.

There are therefore many lessons we need to learn from this crisis:

Never again must we spend billions of rands on an infrastructure programme WITHOUT first determining how it contributes to our key developmental priorities - jobs, overcoming inequality and poverty.

Some bureaucrats in Treasury are defending the e-Toll project because they want to apply the "user-pay" principle to the delivery of ALL infrastructure. If at public expense we provide a rail-line for a big mining house, then the user MUST pay. If we supply scarce electricity to an aluminum smelter plant that uses more electricity than the whole of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, and which hardly creates any jobs in SA, then, again, the user should pay, and it should pay the full cost.

But when we roll-out infrastructure that is used by a wide range of people, in a country with incredibly high levels of inequality and poverty, then the user-pay principle is likely to INCREASE the redistribution of resources FROM the poor to the rich, rather than the other way around. Moreover, the danger with over-exaggerating the "user-pay" principle for infrastructure is that it is liable to deflect us into projects where government calculates that there are many users who can pay - to the detriment of many other infrastructure needs in rural areas, in townships, in poorer provinces, where the possibility of extracting tolls or other levies is much less.

A third major lesson is that we need to learn from the e-Toll saga, is that we have weakened the power of elected politicians in favour of hundreds of quasi-public stand-alone agencies, like SANRAL. As emerged from last week's court case, SANRAL has deliberately suppressed many of the key facts about the project. They blacked out key facts in the documents they handed over to COSATU. But SANRAL even held back information from the Minister of Transport himself. When you weaken the state through agentification into hundreds of "corporate" agencies with their own boards and CEOs, you also weakening democracy, and the power of the ruling Alliance and its ability to mandate and monitor the state.

So how do we go forward on the e-Toll crisis? How do we use the delay? 

We may have to pay for the R20bn debt directly from the budget. But that will mean taking R20bn away from other critical priorities not just in Gauteng - but in the whole of SA. Already, the R5,8bn fiscal contribution to the e-Toll debt, announced by Minister Pravin Gordhan in the budget this year, was R5,8bn taken away from infrastructure roll-overs in other provinces.

We may have to increase the fuel-levy for the purpose of paying this R20bn. That means that minibus drivers in Lusikisiki, or Galeshewe, or Mitchells Plain, will be paying for freeways in the Gauteng that they will never use.

Or we might impose an extra Gauteng fuel levy, but that will mean the rich and poor in Gauteng will have to pay, and it will mean that the many Gautengers who do not use these freeways will also be charged.

We can't just default on the debt, for several reasons, amongst which is the fact that much of the debt is held by the PIC, using the Government Employees Pension Fund, in other words the pensions of hundreds of thousands of COSATU public sector workers are at stake.

It is for this reason that the SACP says there must be an investigation into how we find ourselves in this situation today, so that such a mistake is never repeated again. However, one way or another, the bitter fact is that we are sitting with a R20bn public sector debt. As Lenin said several times: In politics mistakes are made, that is inevitable. The point is to correct them as timeously as possible, and, above all, to look the mistake straight in the eye, to admit the mistake, and to learn lessons from it, so you don't ever repeat it again.

We are right to oppose and campaign against corruption, against labour brokers, against wrong spending on wrong infrastructure priorities.

But we also need to remember that COSATU and the SACP are part of a ruling alliance. Neither of us are the ruling party as such, but we must surely share some of the responsibilities of governance - whether or not we happen to be deployed in government, whether or not we are working in the public sector or not.

Opposition to capitalism is our duty. Opposition to the impact of capitalist interests and opposition to anti-worker influences on our government are absolutely essential.

But of course, neither COSATU nor the SACP are "the opposition". We are not the DA, or COPE, or the FF+. Our profession is not opposition for its own sake. Nor are we the leaders of some nebulous neo-liberal idea of "civil society" - we are unapologetically socialist and working-class formations in an alliance with the ANC and premised on a far-reaching national democratic revolutionary struggle based on the pro-worker and pro-poor ideals of the Freedom Charter.

And that means that in addition to opposing things that are anti-worker and anti-poor, we must also together with the ANC take responsibility for ADVANCING POSITIVE policies for progressive transformation. Opposition is sometimes the easy part; constructive transformation is often the harder part.

In fighting for affordable public transport and public infrastructure, we dare not make the mistake of only focusing on these matters in relation to one province. We must focus on infrastructure investment into all of South Africa, not just Gauteng. This is one of the most critical tasks of the working class in the current period.

Working class mobilization for investment into public infrastructure

It is of utmost importance that the working class takes a lead in driving the massive infrastructure investments as announced by the President in his 2012 State of the Nation Address. Part of this struggle is to ensure that workers pension and provident funds are invested into infrastructure that will create jobs and improve the conditions of the workers and the poor in our country.

It is for this reason that we, once again, call upon COSATU to join the SACP in taking up the financial sector campaign, so that workers' funds are invested in a manner that will transform our society and support government's priorities, including investment into productive activities and infrastructures.

The SACP wishes to reiterate its observation that too much of money's in the hands of the financial sector are being invested into elite projects and investments into consumption rather than productive activity. The rise in unsecured debts is indeed a serious matter that must be addressed as a matter of urgency, and shows the reckless lending that still characterizes the financial sector in our country. Workers must address this matter through their organized power and influence.

Defend and strengthen workers' gains and organization in the workplace

One of the most critical challenges facing the trade union movement today is to intensify the struggle against the casualization and outsourcing. This is a struggle that must be fought in the workplace. It is for this reason also that that the struggle against labour brokers must not only be fought through once-off national strikes, but must be fought daily, in our various workplaces. Workers' in their various workplaces are the ones who know who is hired through labour brokers. It is ultimately in these workplaces struggles that we will defeat the modern-day slave owners.

It is for these reasons that the SACP calls upon, and pledges to work with, the trade union movement in strengthening shop-floor organization and help to strengthen the affiliates in the workplace. One of the consequences of the increasing casualization of the working class has been to create an ever-growing army of vulnerable workers, thus leading to the weakening of a number of COSATU affiliates in the workplace.

The SACP calls upon both communists and worker leaders to use this May Day to focus on the organization of vulnerable workers (like farm, domestic and workers contracted by labour brokers), and to strengthen the weaker affiliates.

Part of strengthening trade union organization must be to intensify the struggle against corruption wherever it occurs, in the public sector, the private sector and within all of our organisations. We must intensify the struggle against business unionism - the use of one's position in the trade union movement to advance private business interests. Whilst unions are workers' organs to defend their interests, to the capitalists they are a source of business because of the pension, provident and insurance funds in their hands. It is for this reason that sections of business will seek to corrupt worker leaders in order to grab these billions. Let us therefore intensify the struggle against business unionism!

Intensify the struggle for a decent social wage

And this is why the SACP agrees with COSATU that, increasingly, we must unite our alliance in action and in campaigning around what we call SOCIAL WAGE issues. Of course, a trade union movement will always have as its bread and butter concern the economic wages of workers. But as long as we confine our attention to the economic wage, to the pay packet, then we will remain trapped within the exploitative confines of capitalism. We will continue to treat workers as commodities struggling for a so-called "fair price" for labour.

But workers are human beings, with a wide range of social needs. What is more, employed workers, under-employed workers and the mass of unemployed can be best be united around issues of common concern:

• Decent education and training opportunities for all, especially for working class families;
• Housing that is well located, that is affordable, and that is part and parcel of building communities with amenities, with parks and sports facilities. No more dormitory townships. Away with rows and rows of houses built miles away from work. Let us put pressure on the banks to fund affordable housing for those stranded in the gap housing market - those who do not qualify for RDP houses, and who are nonetheless turned away by the banks.
• Let us together campaign for decent, affordable and safe public transport.
• But let us understand that we will never have effective and affordable transport for the working class if townships continue to be built far away. If we continue to let property speculators and the private banks dominate our land use policies, and if we allow corrupt politicians to sell off well-located land to these speculators.
• Let us struggle for active land reform - both in the rural areas to ensure sustainable livelihoods - AND in urban areas, so that the cost of land and of affordable housing isn't gambled away by the private speculators building more golf estates and shopping malls for the rich.

Let us refuse to be pulled into factional battles that the media continuously seeks to foment within our ranks. Factional battles around personalities divide our formations from within, they run the risk of dividing our alliance. Over the past 18 years the critical COSATU-SACP axis has been especially important.

It was the COSATU-SACP axis that helped to rescue the ANC from the grip of the neo-liberal "1996 class project". It is the COSATU-SACP socialist axis that must help our key alliance partner, the ANC, to focus on the key struggles of our time. In a world in which capitalism remains dominant, however deep its crisis, in a country in which the capitalist class, and particularly huge monopoly capital interests are deeply entrenched, a socialist axis is absolutely critical. Without a coherent, well organised, active COSATU and SACP - the National Democratic Revolution will be betrayed and lost.

Let us re-commit ourselves during this 2012 May Day to deepen the relationship between COSATU and the SACP, as part of deepening the unity of our Alliance!

SOCIALISM IS THE FUTURE - LET US TOGETHER BEGIN TO BUILD IT NOW!!

Issued by the SACP, May 1 2012

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter