The fight against poverty wages and attacks on workers’ rights goes on! Says SAFTU
30 May 2018
The South African Federation of Trade Unions is disgusted, though not surprised, that the ANC majority in Parliament passed the Poverty National Minimum Wage Bill and amendments to the Labour Relations and Basic Conditions of Employment Acts which will threaten workers’ constitutional right to strike.
This vote in the National Assembly proves how far this former national liberation movement has sunk.
In its 1969 Morogoro Conference the ANC declared that “In our country — more than in any other part of the oppressed world — it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy… Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation.”
Today it has voted to accept and legitimise a poverty national minimum wage of R20, R18, R15 ad R11 an hour, which even its own leader concedes is not a living wage. It has missed an opportunity to free workers from the apartheid wage gap that kept black workers in abject poverty for years. It has done nothing to slash the levels of inequality which has led to South Africa becoming the world’s most unequal society.