WORKERS AND COMMUNITIES MUST OCCUPY AND TAKE OVER FACTORIES AND FARMS RUN BY LABOUR BROKERS
The Democratic Left Front (DLF) salutes the thousands of workers who came out in today's general strike against labour brokering and the Gauteng e-tolls. To take forward today's marches, the DLF calls on workers employed by labour brokers and affected working class communities to occupy, take over, run and produce from operations run by labour brokers as well as other places of employment.
The DLF calls for these to be run as worker-owned and worker-controlled cooperative enterprises that produce, create jobs, pay a living wage and provide decent working conditions. Such worker takeovers are the logical and most effective conclusion of today's mass marches, and the most effective answer to guarantee the right to work, decent employment conditions and a living wage.
It is not enough to call for the banning of labour brokers as if that will reverse the capitalist exploitation of workers in the workplace. Workers and communities must turn the tables and sustained the offensive launched by today's successful marches. This is not a pipe-dream as the former workers of the Mineline factory (to the west of Johannesburg) have attempted such a takeover from August last year. We call on COSATU to turn the struggle against labour brokers to worker takeovers of production.
Beyond the delivery of the memoranda of demands to the neo-liberal government led by the ANC as today's marches did, the DLF also calls for serious attention to be paid to the sustained mobilisation and organisation of precarious workers employed by labour brokers. For its part, working with one of its affiliates, the Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers' Union (CSAAWU), the DLF is contributing to important and nascent work to organise precarious workers in farms and agri-processing factories in Robertson, Rawsonville, Ashton and other commercial farming districts of the Western Cape.
In these districts, labour brokers have now become a central feature in the exploitation of thousands of farm workers, many of whom are essentially treated as cheap migrant labour in conditions akin to human trafficking.