NUMSA SUPPORTS FAWU AND CEPPWAWU STRUGGLES FOR A LIVING WAGE

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) supports the ongoing workers struggles led by our allies, FAWU and CEPPWAWU respectively. These strikes are not only about decent wages, but a launching pad for a Living Wage campaign to be undertaken by our federation, COSATU.

As an industrial union that is located at the coal-face of class exploitation, we fully understand the misery and suffering that capitalism continues to inflict on humanity. These ongoing class struggles are an epitome of an ugly face of sharpening class contradictions in a capitalist society, which enriches the few white males and plunges the majority African working class into squalor, poverty and underdevelopment as evidenced in apartheid created slums, townships and Bantustans.

These mass industrial actions by our two allied unions should not be de-linked from the broader working class struggle to radically transform property relations underpinning South Africa's capitalist economy. The industrial action should not only be about wage increases, but also be about the call for the nationalization of strategic industries in order to meet the basic needs of the working class. 

Nationalizing monopolies such as steel, banking and mining industries will provide the much needed resources for the provision of free, quality public education, faster and improved service delivery and implementation of the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme.

We urge the workers to be unwavering in their demands for a living wage, improved working conditions and the banning of labour brokers. In addition these struggles by workers are sharply raising the regulation of executive pay in order close the apartheid wage gap. Workers should also call for progressive taxation, so that the rich pay more in the form of taxes and the disclosure of company profits, executive pay and bonuses as a platform from which to advance the quest for a living wage. 

We call on the workers to be resolute and vigilant in exposing the ideological bankruptcy of the self-anointed mouthpieces of capital located in the bourgeois newsroom and JSE-funded research institutes, pertaining to their false assertions that workers demands are unaffordable and unrealistic.

As NUMSA we call on both FAWU and CEPPWAWU to intensify their offensive until capitalist bosses concedes to workers demands for a living wage.

Statement issued by Castro Ngobese, NUMSA national spokesperson, July 18 2011

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