Wwn91 draft 3 final

1WORKERS WORLD NEWS | No. 91 | March 2015

ISSUE 91 | MARCH 2015

alternatives to globalisation

BUILDING UNITY IN STRUGGLE

Building unity in struggleMthetho XhaliSyriza’s election victoy: A big milestone?Michael BlakeAssassinations in Glebelands Hostel Vanessa BurgerWomen say NO to big coal! WoMin Regional ConsortiumMy organisationEkurhuleni Environmental OrganisationEducational series: Imperialism Part 1Leonard Gentle

Continued on page 2...

A signifi cant section of the South African working class have come to the conclusion that the problems confronting the working class can only be resolved through collective struggles.

Many among the working class – both unemployed and employed – have also realised that they can no longer depend on others,

especially political parties and those in power, to resolve problems confronting the working class. It is due to this recognition that we are witnessing an increase in the number of militant community protests in diverse sections of South Africa’s working class.

Other manifestations of this trend has been an increase in wildcat strikes since the Marikana massacre, inspired by the courage that was displayed by platinum mineworkers despite state brutality. Such militancy was also expressed in 2014’s five month long platinum mineworkers strike that was led by AMCU.

A key feature of the new community struggles is that community members themselves are initiating it, not the ruling ANC alliance, previously so dominant in working class areas, nor by SANCO, an ANC-aligned civic formation. In fact, many of those involved in community struggles are suspicious and distrustful of political parties due to the failure of the former liberation movement to realise their expectations and demands.

These ongoing self-organised community struggles remain mostly isolated from each other even though they share many common

Collective struggles are a powerful tool to confront working class struggles. Photo: Jacob Potlaki

THE WORKING CLASS

STRUGGLE TOGETHER

2 WORKERS WORLD NEWS | No. 91 | March 2015

Lead Story

concerns, with workers and labour unions also largely absent. Notable exceptions where workers and communities made common cause were the 2012 Marikana platinum and farm workers’ strikes such as in De Doorns. Earlier attempts to unify struggles provincially – for example the now defunct Anti-Privatisation Forum and Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, as well as the former national Social Movements Indaba – have fallen apart.

We now witness the rise of two significant national initiatives that seek to unify the many dispersed struggles, NUMSA’s United Front (UF) and the People’s Movement (PEMO).

A PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT

The growing PEMO arose from joint initiatives of the Metsimaholo Concerned Residents in Zamdela, the Greater Westonaria Concerned Residents Association, in Bekkersdal, and the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee. This idea of unifying community struggles nationally was endorsed by 29 community organisations in April 2014. The stated aims of PEMO are to bring together and act as a glue for community struggles countrywide.

A national Day of Action on March 25, 2015

against the ANC government’s anti-poor

policies is set to publicly launch the People’s

Movement. Communities, organisations and

concerned residents groups will march to

their respective municipalities to present

and highlight their demands after a year of

preparation. The decentralised, yet coordinated,

organisation-from-below allow communities

to determine their own priority actions and

to include the unemployed and poor in

mobilisation.

Some PEMO-aligned communities are

tentatively discussing fielding independent

candidates to contest the 2016 local

government elections. They want to replace

the unaccountable councilors with trusted

representatives whom they can recall if they

fail to maintain community mandates at ward

level.

PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT AND NUMSA’S UNITED FRONT

The PEMO welcomes NUMSA’s new approach

towards community struggles since it has

broken with the ANC’s anti-poor policy

direction. However, many within the PEMO

argue that NUMSA cannot champion, nor lead,

community struggles since NUMSA was absent

from their struggles for years. They also note

problematic statements emanating from the

NUMSA camp that community struggles are

leaderless. Some fear that NUMSA will use

community struggles to realise its own objective

of forming a political party. Instead, the PEMO

proposes that NUMSA joins its community

struggles, but in a supportive role. Given these

reservations, the PEMO resolved not to be part

of the NUMSA United Front.

NUMSA’S UNITED FRONT

NUMSA resolved in its 2013 National Special

Congress to lead the establishment of a United

Front (UF) with two prominent aims. The

first task of the UF would be to coordinate

struggles in workplaces and communities. The

second is to mobilise for the implementation

of the Freedom Charter to ramp up its struggle

against neoliberal policies. To this end, the

UF called a number of meetings – nationally

and provincially – to explain its aims to invited

community movements. NUMSA also took

up a campaign against unemployment and

the controversial Employment Tax Incentive

Act (“Youth Wage Subsidy”). This campaign

culminated in a one-day strike on March 19

last year and attracted a number of community

movements.

NUMSA started building township-based UF

structures and formally launched five provincial

structures. A national Preparatory Assembly

in December 2014 brought together 350

delegates from trade unions, social movements,

faith based organisations and NGOs. The

Preparatory Assembly reaffirmed the task of

uniting struggles of workers, the unemployed,

women and youths. The main task of the UF

was set as building of movements centred on

fighting corruption, faltering service delivery,

unaccountable governance, violence against

women, children and LGBTI people, police

brutality and anti-poor economic policies. In

line with its declaration of being a front for

mass action and struggle, the UF embarked

on a National Day of Action on Budget Day, 25 February, to unite against an anticipated austerity budget. The UF will also organise a Day of Mass Action on 21 March in defence of human rights, freedom of expression and the right to organise, while agitating against police brutality. NUMSA’s UF is scheduled to formally launch in June this year.

For both these initiatives to succeed they must prioritise communities and organisations that are in struggle. Fighting sections of the working class would have to be allowed to formulate their own demands and programmes and to set the pace of their own struggles. The linking of struggles should open opportunities for all of them to collectively learn from their respective struggles, while strengthening a critical mass. NUMSA must find creative ways of involving its members beyond its shop steward layer in the UF to ensure a mass-character movement.

Ironically, NUMSA’s emphasis on reviving the Freedom Charter as a core aim of the UF have emerged as a bone of contention within the UF and has been identified as one of the issues for further debate. Some argue that framing the debate around the Freedom Charter will distract activists, communities and movements from developing their own programmes and views from struggles.

NUMSA and its UF allies must engage with some of the concerns of the PEMO activists noted above that are also shared by many within communities. NUMSA’s UF must also develop a response on how it will support campaigns initiated by the People’s Movement.

PEMO must also develop an approach on how to win the support of the UF for its campaigns and struggles; as well as a response to the actions called by the UF. Both these new movements cannot escape a discussion on potential tactical alliances given that they share an objective of uniting struggles, while both seek to advance the struggles of the working class against the anti-poor policies of the ANC government and capitalists. It is not enough for the People’s Movement to say they won’t be part of the NUMSA United Front. Whatever the differences between these two initiatives, grassroots activists should not be distracted from the core task of building a new mass movement through struggle.

NOTHING ABOUT

US WITHOUT US

ENOUGH

IS ENOUGH

SYRIZA’S ELECTION VICTORY


International News

A BIG MILESTONE?

The year 2015 started with a bang in Greece as Syriza (‘Coalition of the Radical Left’) won the national elections with 36% of the vote. Falling just two seats short to govern on its own, the party entered into an alliance with ANEL, a right-wing nationalist party that is hostile to the austerity policies imposed by the Troika (comprising the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF), but is also vehemently anti-immigrant.

While the share of the votes of PASOK (the Greek ‘socialist’ party) dropped from 44% in 2009 to 4,8%, New Democracy (a rightwing conservative party) lost more than half of the seats it won in 2012.

A number of relatively new political formations on the left, such as Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, have previously contested elections on an anti-austerity and anti-neoliberal platform.

However, Syriza is the first to win enough votes to enter into a coalition and form a government.

AUSTERITY AND ITS IMPACT

By 2009 Greece had a state debt of over 300 billion Euros and a budget deficit four times higher than EU rules allowed. The Troika imposed a debt rescue package that included severe austerity measures, the first of its kind in Europe. These were ruthlessly implemented by New Democracy in 2010 and in coalition with PASOK from 2012.

While the bankers and other capitalists of Greece and the EU profited handsomely; the working class bore the brunt of austerity policies.

The harsh austerity measures included: cuts in wages, bonuses and pension rates; a lowering of the minimum wage; the laying off of thousands of public sector workers; a raising of the retirement age from 60 to 65 years; decentralisation of wage bargaining; the undermining of worker rights; the slashing of education, health and social security budgets; and wide-ranging privatisation.

THE ANTI-AUSTERITY MOVEMENT

Since 2009 there has been ongoing and militant mass resistance to the austerity measures, including almost 30 one- or two-day general strikes, a series of occupations of public squares, workplaces and university campuses and innumerable protests that typically led to clashes with the police.

This movement of resistance involved all sections of the working class hit by the austerity programme: public sector workers, patients and users of the health service, social security beneficiaries, the youth, students/teachers/lecturers, the laid-off/unemployed/underemployed; the homeless; and the victims of business bankruptcies.

It was in this climate that Syriza received support from sections of the working class for its anti-austerity programme in the recent elections. Many now look to the Syriza government to scrap both the anti-austerity measures and the debt and to lead a way out of the crisis.

WHAT NEXT?

In his first major speech after the election, the new Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras insisted that Syriza would make good on its campaign promises to roll back austerity. He committed the government, among other things, to raise the minimum wage and pension levels; reinstate laid-off public sector workers; and reintroduce collective bargaining.

While Greece is effectively bankrupt, the anti-austerity measures that the new Syriza

government has committed itself to will require vast amounts of money that it is still hoping to secure from the Troika. The latter will drive a hard bargain; while, on the other hand, compromise with the Troika will place a strain on the relationship between Syriza and its militant and expectant base of voters and members.

At the same time, ANEL will seek concessions to ensure its continued support for the government coalition with Syriza; in the meanwhile, a neo-fascist party, Golden Dawn, which has links to the police and the army, is now the third most popular party in Greece.

Clearly the situation is highly charged, if not at a political and economic tipping point. Bold measures that could lead to a break with capitalism are on the cards – but will Syriza take them?

IS IT ALL GREEK TO US?

Are we in South Africa not facing our own period of a neoliberal austerity that is linked to the capitalist crisis? Is the South African working class not already facing social and economic devastation similar to its Greek counterpart? Will the ANC in coming years not suffer the same fate as PASOK? Could NUMSA’s United Front become a mass anti-neoliberal movement? Will NUMSA’s political project give birth to an anti-austerity and anti-capitalist party such as Syriza? Will this offer a way out of the crisis of capitalism?

Whatever the answers, activists should debate these and related questions and closely follow the unfolding developments in Greece.

GREECE’S AUSTERITY RESULTED IN DISASTER FOR THE WORKING CLASS AND MUCH OF GREECE’S MIDDLE CLASS:

4 - 11 MILLION

36% INCREASE

9% - 28%UNEMPLOYMENT IN 2009

30% WAGE CUT

111000BANKRUPT

LIVE IN POVERTY

IN SUICIDE RATE (2010-2012)

GREEK BUSINESSES IN 2011

Cultural Page

We want to see more pollution in AmericaOtherwise they won’t have more industries thatConsume more gases than the rest of the world

We want more leaders like George BushSo he can continue to kill Iraqi, Afghan and Sudanese civiliansDo the bidding of Nike, McDonalds, Exxon-MobilSo that multinationals’ CEOs can continue to make millions a yearAnd the exploited proletariat a pittance in poor countriesPave the way for free trade agreements in poor countriesFor the trickle down economy to become a realitySo that sell-out American wannabe’s can continue to wear American

designer labels

We want more leaders like Mbeki, Zuma and SelebiSo they can sleep with women as young as their daughtersKnowing that they can take a shower afterwards to avoid HIV infectionSupported by their party stooges of all forms and shadesSo we can sympathise with a president suffering from self-diagnosed

conspiratorial theoriesFiring big guns who scare the shit out of himAnd keeping criminal types too close for comfort

We want more women victimised at work,Beaten to a pulp by their partnersRaped, traumatised in all kinds of unspeakable waysAnd only see justice during the 16 days of activismBecause during the year we the police are too busy killing our partners

to careToo busy taking bribes from drug dealersToo busy losing prosecution files

We want to see more illiteracyBecause we know for South African teachersThere are only three months of the yearJanuary, February, March, march, march, marchBecause we want to booze with our scholars increasing more lawlessnessImpregnate and screw our scantily clad girl scholars spreading moral

decayAfter all who can blame us for wanting these things?We were led by Mbeki who speaks left, but walks rightSupport Zuma who masquerades as an ordained preacher of moral

regenerationBut is actually a patriarch of moral indecency

We want more bogus elections in Kenya, Zimbabwe and elsewhereTo remind us that in Africa Democracy is not the people’s voiceBut what is dictated by those with guns and economic powerThat, as in the words of Bob MarleyDemocracy will always be but a fleeting illusionTo be pursued but never attained

We definitely want more doccies to commemorate 911Not to remind us that on the 11th of September 2001, 24 000 children

died of hunger that dayBut that ’special 3000’ Americans died that dayRather than some infants from some obscure country in the Third World

We want more prepaid basic necessities like electricity, water and phonesSo that the poor can always know their place and be plunged into darkness(Most of them live in Dark Africa anyway)Or be without water

They always have the alternative of their malaria and dirt infested riversRemain without emergency telecommunicationsAnyway who cares if they stab each other Or have sick relativesThey are the poors

We want more privatisation of educationAnd rising fees of tertiary institutionsSo that only the children of the elitists can have access to higher educationAfter all why must we provide subsidised education to the children

of the poorsWho will then wash our cars, clean our houses and tend to our every elitist whim?

Of course we want more posh soccer stadiums for 2010Instead of more well-equipped public schools and hospitalsIt’s the poors who go thereWe have our own private institutions to look after us

We want more Marikana massacresBecause even if evidence points at the Ramaphosas of this world having

orchestrated this ghastly eventPeople will continue to vote ANCIt’s the poors who died anywayBecause as in Zuma’s words ANC will reign until Jesus comes

We want more xenophobic attacks and killings and lootingWho cares for them anyway? They fled their countries because of internecine drought, hungerAnd who says we subscribe to an injury to one is an injury to all?After all we never asked them to host us when we were in exileWe’ve never went to Africa at allWe were in Moscow adopting Stalinist political modus operandi

We want to continue subsidising BHP Billiton with more electricity at less prices

We have the poors to pay for itAnd who cares if we plunge them into darkness with frequent

loadshedding?They have their already depleted fossil fuels as alternative Not this nonsensical new lingo they want us to pursue To keep the coal in the ground And the oil in the soil

We want more BRICSBecause imperialism is the only solutionWho the hell are the poors to tell us about Democracy from below?

We want – we want – we wantBecause we are greedy multinationalsWorld Bank, IMF, World Trade Organisations, G8, even NEPADWe are the economic mafia – the untouchablesBecause the workers of the world do not take heed and listen to Karl

Marx and EngelsFor the workers of the world to uniteBecause they have nothing else to looseBUT THEIR CHAINS!


They fled their countries because of internecine drought, hungerAnd who says we subscribe to an injury to one is an injury to all?After all we never asked them to host us when we were in exile

We were in Moscow adopting Stalinist political modus operandi

We want to continue subsidising BHP Billiton with more electricity at

And who cares if we plunge them into darkness with frequent

They have their already depleted fossil fuels as alternative Not this nonsensical new lingo they want us to pursue

Because imperialism is the only solutionWho the hell are the poors to tell us about

World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organisations, G8, even NEPAD

Because the workers of the world do not take heed and listen to Karl

We were in Moscow adopting Stalinist political modus operandi

We want to continue subsidising BHP Billiton with more electricity at

And who cares if we plunge them into darkness with frequent

They have their already depleted fossil fuels as alternative Not this nonsensical new lingo they want us to pursue

Because imperialism is the only solutionWho the hell are the poors to tell us about

World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organisations, G8, even NEPAD

Because the workers of the world do not take heed and listen to Karl

we want, we want, we wantFaith ka-manzi


My Struggle

POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS AT GLEBELANDS HOSTEL: THE KZN KILLING FIELDS CONTINUE

Since March last year 21 people have been assassinated at Glebelands Hostel in uMlazi, Durban, over 100 illegally evicted and 4 allegedly tortured by police. One died during interrogation. The last to be slain was Fikile Siyephu, killed at Glebe block 49 on 15 February 2015. “They came to my room just after midnight and asked if I was the ‘Commander’. When I said yes, he checked the list. Then he hit me in the stomach with his rifle, pushed me back into my room and demanded to know where my guns were. Other police searched my room. When they couldn’t find any guns, they stopped hitting me, two police sat on my legs… and put the plastic bag over my head.”

Thulani Kati was the first witness to confirm the existence of the now infamous Glebelands ‘hit list’ – reportedly a foolscap page containing the names of Hostel block committee members and their associates who are accused of being ‘against’ local ANC ward councillor, Robert Mzobe. Kati was the third resident since March last year, allegedly tortured by police – who, many claim – collude with politicians to exclude the community from participation in hostel development, purportedly to control lucrative upgrade and service tenders, ensuring a continued flow of resources to provincial party coffers.

PRESSURE COOKER OF EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS

Glebelands is an apartheid-style hostel upgraded to family units. It is located in Durban’s heavily polluted south, facing the main freeway to the Eastern Cape, where many of its 22 000 residents hail from. Although

regarded as an ANC stronghold, inter-party factionalism, criminal gangs, warlords, taxi rivalry, hit squads, contractual corruption and the brutal arm of the state feeds into a river of violence that runs just beneath the seemingly placid surface. Yet, ordinary people struggle against a tide of unemployment of over 60%-plus and exclusion from decision-making processes.

In June 2013, after years spent fruitlessly following the correct procedure to replace a councillor whom many claim is arrogant, unapproachable and, some allege, mired in corruption, community frustration boiled over and the councillor’s office was burnt down. The names of those believed to be involved in the mobilisation now appear to form the basis of the ‘hit list’.

The insurrection was quickly quelled and negotiations with the province followed. However, shortly before the 2014 elections, the process stalled permanently. Three block chairmen had already been killed and assaults and forced evictions of block committee members, allegedly by politically aligned thugs, was in full swing.

NEW POLICE, OLD TACTICS

Months of silence and a mounting body count followed. The full might of the ANC’s regional hegemony swung into play last September, when, at a mass community meeting, KZN Premier, Senzo Mchunu, announced the immediate dissolution of all community-elected block committee structures, a R10 million hostel security upgrade, and the deployment of ‘new’ police – so feared that residents were warned, “don’t look them in the eye or they will attack you”. Thus peace was declared at Glebelands.

Four days later, these ‘new’ police – allegedly members of a Public Order Policing (POP) Unit – were accused of torturing former block chairman, Thulani Kati and another resident. Residents were relieved when the police presence suppressed the internecine violence and suspicion, but fear and loathing of what was perceived to be an ‘occupying force’ escalated.

SELECTIVE JUSTICE TO QUELL OPPOSITION

During the months of violence, not one conviction was obtained out of the more than forty cases on record. Most of the (seemingly fabricated) charges against those associated with the former block committee structures continue to drag on in regional courts. By comparison, few cases relating to those allegedly aligned with the ward councillor appear to linger long within the criminal justice system. Likewise, state social support departments have consistently disregarded pleas for assistance and failed to support previous victims of violence.

The heavily enforced ‘peace’ ended when Phumlani Ndlovu was brutally gunned down just sixteen days into the New Year. Some say suspected hit squad members lured him into a trap. No arrests have been made.

It would seem that the authorities are too embroiled in an intra-ANC struggle for provincial control and thus the lucrative public purse, to concern themselves with the murder of yet another hostel dweller.

WILL THE GLEBELANDS DEATH TOLL END AT 21?

Unlikely, say many, if the underlying causes of the violence remain unaddressed by politicians who prioritise personal acquisition over service delivery and use any means – including assassination and torture – to cling to power long after they have destroyed their own legitimacy.

“How can there be calm, when the storm is yet to come”

Quote by Jamaican dub-poet Linton Kwesi Johnson


This breakthrough, after years of rampant exploitation by bosses and labour brokers on the back of neoliberal deregulation could potentially transform South Africa’s labour landscape.

The significance of the Labour Relations Amendment Act (No.6 of 2014) (LRAA) cannot be overstated. To get the full benefit of the new measures, it is important that potential beneficiaries are fully informed of their new rights and how to mobilise in making sure they are implemented.

However, an apparent “conspiracy of silence” has so far marked the implementation, as many workers remain largely unaware of their new rights. One reason is that many of the precariously employed are not part of organised trade unions and labour organisations.

Workers World News focuses on key implications for both workers and for labour brokers. We also look at the exclusions and – importantly – the need to fully educate ourselves and fellow workers on the new provisions to ensure our gains are not rolled back.

HIGHLIGHTS

A very big change is that ‘fixed-term contract’ and ‘labour broker’ workers must be permanently employed by the company they work for after three months of employment, and must get the same benefits, wages and rights as other fulltime workers doing similar work. Many of these workers have been with the same employer for over a decade, but without a secure contract and rights similar to full-time employees. In the case of ‘labour broker’ workers, it is the client company that must permanently employ the workers.

‘Fixed-term contract’ workers’ may no longer work on a fixed-term contract for more than three months. After the three months, they must be given a permanent employment contract. If there are special reasons for a fixed-term contract, these agreements must formally stipulate clear start and end dates. Bosses can no longer extend contracts when it suits them, sometimes year in and year out. They cannot even extend workers’ contracts month-by-month beyond 3 months, according to the new legislation.

‘Labour broker’ workers who work less than three months for a client company are workers of the labour broker and not of the client company. But the amendments give important rights even to such workers. For example, they must get the same rights workers in the client company’s sector get, from the time they start working for the client company.

If ‘labour broker’ or ‘fi xed-term’ workers are dismissed after three months, they will be treated as fi red workers and can go to the CCMA for unfair dismissal.

‘Labour broker’ workers must now receive written details of their job on their first day of employment and have the same rights in bargaining councils and sectoral determinations as full-time workers of their company.

‘Part-time’ workers must be treated just the same as full-time workers, with full benefits (training, leave, sick leave), although

NEW ERA FOR ‘CASUAL’ WORKERS: A CALL TO MOBILISATION

Centre Spread

After two decades of casualisation of work, groundbreaking new labour legislation seeking to protect precarious workers came into eff ect in January. For the fi rst time ever, ‘contract’, ‘part-time’ and ‘labour broker’ workers can now claim real RIGHTS and protection in law.


proportional to their working hours. Employers may only treat

them differently if they can give good reasons, such as levels

of experience, seniority and merit.

All disputes about the new provisions and misunderstandings

related to these categories of work must be referred to

the CCMA and bargaining councils for conciliation and

arbitration.

When a worker is dismissed for trying to enforce the new

legislation, it will be treated as unfair dismissal before the

CCMA or a bargaining council.

A CHANCE TO MOBILISE AND STRENTHEN OUR GAINS

It is crucial that workers organise and mobilise to ensure

these rights are enforced, according to the co-ordinator of the

Casual Workers’ Advice Office (CWAO), Ighsaan Schroeder. If

not enforced, the laws would in all likelihood be diminished

by bosses, ending up little more than a paper tiger, or even

challenged in the Constitutional Court. Bosses may, for

instance, quickly dismiss workers they are now obliged to

take care of in law. On the other hand, if workers mobilise

to demand enforcement, the set of protective measures may

well form the core of new forms of workplace organisation.

“The main thing is these are significant new rights and

the issue is whether we take them up”, says Schroeder.

“The question is who is going to do that. It is clear

traditional labour unions are not interested. So it will be

your community organisations and some NGOs. The most

important thing is that people must be made aware of their

rights and to mobilise around that.”

The legislation does not only apply to private companies,

but also the state and local government. None of them can

continue to treat these categories of workers as people with

diminished rights.

LABOUR BROKERS

All labour broker companies must now register with the

labour department before they can legally work.

The Act says a labour broker is anyone who gets money to

supply workers to a client company and pays the workers’

wages. Workers who work in this way are the workers of the

labour broker, not of the client company.

However, the Act stipulates that if a labour broker breaks

rights granted through a bargaining council agreement,

in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act or a sectoral

determination, then the labour broker and the client company

are both guilty. In such a case, the worker can take action

against either the labour broker or the client company, or

both of them.

A labour broker must give a worker all the written details of his or her job at the start of the employment period.

A labour broker cannot give workers worse conditions than the rights enshrined in labour laws. Nor can they give workers worse conditions than the rights in a sectoral determination or a bargaining council agreement if the client company is covered by one of those. If there is a dispute about the rights the worker is covered by, the important factor will be the sector and area that the client company is based in.

The contracts that labour brokers give to workers must also be in line with their rights in the new legislation, other labour laws and the sectoral determination or bargaining council agreement that covers the client company.

WORKERS NOT COVERED BY THE NEW RIGHTS

Workers earning above R205 433 per year on ‘fixed-term contracts’ are exempt from these new changes in the LRA.

Workers working for employers with fewer than ten workers or with less than 50 employees during the first two years of the company’s operations, are also not bound by these new rights.

The amendments also allow for agreements to be made in bargaining councils for longer periods of work for ‘labour broker’ and ‘fixed-term contract’ workers. The state will also introduce a list of kinds of work that will be treated as ‘temporary services’.

Centre Spread

PEOPLE MUST

BE AWARE OF

THEIR RIGHTS

THE NEW RIGHTS APPLY IMMEDIATELY

The new rights have been in eff ect since 1 January, 2015 – and workers can already demand many of them.

1 JAN


Coal kills people and devastates local environments. Coal divides communities when corporations form local alliances that are detrimental to the majority. Coal exploits labour – both paid mining jobs and unpaid women’s work in reproducing labour and community. And coal contributes most signifi cantly to climate change, and the destruction of our planet. But women and their communities are not standing down – their fight stretches from the coalfields in Mpumalanga to one of the largest coal deposits in the world, in the Tete province of Mozambique. Women are not just fighting the extraction of coal, and its myriad damaging effects, but they are also contesting the underlying development paradigm, patriarchal extractivism. Mama Life (we use a pseudonym to protect her from reprisal), a farmer affected by coal digs, displacements and pollution by Vale, the Brazilean mining company, pleads, “What is the point of development? We bear the cost of development, but do not receive the money made from mining. How do we fight back…?”

More than 50 grassroots women activists gathered from around the region in January to stand their ground against Big Coal. Their six-day exchange and strategy meeting involved dozens of organisations from southern Africa.

Coal is the fastest growing fossil fuel and the single largest contributor (40%) to carbon emissions, which cause climate change. Climate change is projected to escalate due to the more than 1200 coal-fired power plants and related infrastructure projects proposed in over 65 countries. The three largest plants under construction are all in South Africa, which relies on coal for 94% of energy needs, mainly to serve mines and industry.

If they and other polluters continue to use these levels of dirty energy, we will stay on track to a

4-degree temperature increase, but for Africa’s interior that will mean up to 9 degrees. Women will take the brunt of this unprecedented catastrophe, which could kill 185 million Africans this century.

Coal’s costs start at the point of extraction and include its transportation, combustion and processing. Coal leads to land and water grabs, displacements, hunger, pollution and sickness. The ‘externalisation’ of these costs mainly hurts the poor and working-class black communities, and women in particular. It is the unpaid labour of poor and working class women, which rehabilitates damaged environments and nurses ill family and community members, and often walk for hours in a day in search of safe drinking water. Costs are shifted from coal corporations and power utilities who are able to preserve the myth of cheap coal.

This externalisation is starkly evident in Sasolburg, a large industrial town established by the petrochemical giant Sasol in 1954. Last month, the regional coal activists visited women in Zamdela Township, within walking distance of Sasol One, where coal is squeezed to make oil. They explained how sinusitis and asthma

are distressing their families. Women caregivers nurse the ill but they suffer sicknesses of their own. There are grounds for concern that Sasol has polluted the entire area’s water supplies. The firm’s Secunda plant is the world’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

What the women participants to the regional exchange have also learned in their various struggles against Big Coal, is that the corporations have purchased allies in government and the ruling party, local traditional leaders and sometimes dogmatic trade unions. The women recorded how they have been harassed and threatened, side-lined for local municipal employment, and victimised during police violence against peaceful protests.

One of the participants said: “When you speak… you never know what is going to happen to you.”

This is the time for wide alliances of workers, young people, environmental and climate justice activists, and women’s rights organisations and movements to stand their ground. Women are taking a strong bold step, standing on the side of the planet and of human life, and saying NO MORE!

WoMin is a regional alliance of women’s organisations and movements fighting deadly natural resource extraction, led the Women stand their ground against Big Coal Southern African exchange.

Gender Page

WOMEN IN SOUTHERN AFRICA STAND THEIR GROUND AND SAY ‘NO’ TO BIG COAL

WOMEN SAY

'NO MORE'

TANZANIAN

ARTISINAL MINER

Section of WoMin poster. Photo: Evan Rubara.


My Organisation

Three young children died when they fell into an open mine shaft at Vlakfontein Mine in the East Rand town of Springs. Six year’s later the erstwhile coalmine owners are yet to be found, and the people of the adjacent community are still waiting for local government action on the dangerous open Shaft 5, long abandoned.

This is just one of many crosscutting environmental concerns that have occupied the Ekurhuleni Environmental Organisation (EEO) since its inception in 1998. Ours is just one of many struggles of communities living at the edge of abandoned mines, who battle poisoned environments: acid mine drainage, air pollution, and lack of water and electricity. Women carry the extra burden of the violence bred in such socio-economic depravity, including the regular rape of young girls. Lack of water delivery means women fetch mine-poisoned water from the river that gave Springs its name.

MINING’S LEGACY

Good quality coal was discovered at Springs in 1888. The settlement grew and the discovery

of gold a decade later saw the establishment of the now controversial and ruined Grootvlei Proprietary Mines. By 1962, Springs produced 10% of the country’s gold and 9% of it’s uranium. However, by the end of the 1960’s, the last mine in town, Daggafontein, was exhausted. The town did not die, but instead developed into an industrial zone, yet the Vlakfontein coalmine shaft 5 in Kwa-Thema still bears witness to its mining past. Kwa-Thema in Ekurhuleni falls within Springs and many still live in poverty in the Paynville area at the edge of the abandoned shaft, an area called Interland, where they were moved by the apartheid government.

Phulong Secondary and the Phelang School for the handicapped are adjacent to the notorious Vlakfontein shaft 5, compelling learners to pass the unsecured area daily. In 2009 three children – aged 3, 5 and 7 – fell into the seemingly bottomless flooded shaft, never to be found or buried by the Mkwanazi family. A street committee leader started an unsuccessful battle with the local government to have the shaft closed. The excuse: the municipality can’t find the mine’s owners.

NO ONE TO ACCOUNT

Later a ward councilor protested that the area was destined for a train station to link the settlement with Duduza, but nothing came of the 2008 plan. EEO made further protestations to the councilor in 2011, only to be told that those with the development plans for the area had passed away. Nothing has been done to secure the area. EEO keeps being promised that the mine-owners were being tracked down. All the organisation can do is to paint and write on the wall of the shaft to make the community aware of the dangers we are facing. We are still in the process of finding other ways to make the area safe.

EEO members have started forming networks with other communities living with the devastation left behind by greedy miners – from Emalahleni to the West Rand and beyond – and work with researchers and monitors such as the Bench Marks Foundation, the Community Monitors Action Network and Mining Affected Communities United in Action.

EKURHULENI ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANISATION (EEO)

Communities are still waiting for local government to take action on dangerous open shaft 5. Photo: Supplied by EEO

3 CHILDREN FELL INTO

A SHAFT AND DIED

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Today there is not a single day which goes by without reports of a war somewhere, in some part of the world – from the Boko Haram group kidnapping schoolgirls, to the Israeli’s invading Gaza, to the group, Islamic State, carving out territory in Syria and Iraq, to the war between Ukrainian and Russian-speaking people in

Ukraine, to the USA sending drones to kill people in Pakistan while occupying Afghanistan. In fact more wars have been fought since the end of the Second World War and more people have been killed than in the two World Wars. Almost all of these wars have involved the world’s super-power – the United States of America (USA) – in some way.

PART 1

IMPERIALISM: THE WORLD TODAY

As people we ask everyday – in movies, in songs, in the media and in the games that children play – to take sides in what appears to be an eternal battle of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’: the good is Western, white and Christian, which we must all identify with and cheer on, and the ‘evil’ is the ‘other’, the ‘foreign’, everyone else that doesn’t fit the dominant image.

In South Africa, activists fighting for a decent life for all know that time and time again we get told by journalists and professors that we must temper our demands and be more realistic because we must satisfy ‘international investors’. Activists in other parts of Africa – in Zambia, Tanzania, in the Congo – experience the same pressure but in their case the ‘international investors’ are South African companies. Many of these ‘investors’ gathered at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland – where bankers, billionaires and finance ministers meet annually – to plot how to shape the world so that they can make more money.

South Africa is now part of a group of countries called the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which have come together to try and forge an alternative world currency to the US dollar.

All of these instances can be traced to a system in which some countries have the power to dictate what happens to the people of the rest of the world. Within this system of global power there are countries which are eager to rise to the level where they can supplant the currently powerful and are in competition with them. And then there are people who are struggling for the right to self-determination against other powerful states which seek to crush their struggles for such self-determination.

This system of power, violence and control in which some countries are able to dictate the destiny of others we call imperialism.

IMPERIALISM TODAY

Today the major imperialist power is the USA – the country with the world’s largest army, the main supplier of weapons in the world, the country with military bases on all continents of the world, whose currency – the dollar – is the world’s reserve currency and the currency of global trade. The country which dominates all global institutions –

from the United Nations, to the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. The country whose movies, TV series, music and books shape all of our perceptions of the world.

The USA has important regional allies through which it is able to extend its domination – like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the Middle East, Colombia in Latin America, and Britain – which is always willing to back any US aggression anywhere in the world.

But there are other countries with ambitions to take the place of the USA (at least in some regions of the world) – which often come into competition with the USA for political control and economic domination – like China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, Brazil and South Africa. These are rival imperial powers.

And then there are those parts of the world where poor people are victims of imperialism and are struggling to free themselves from its control. But often these struggles get caught up in legacies of how imperialist powers carved up the world over the last 150 years – and imposed borders that cut across nationality, culture, language and religion. And so many struggles today express themselves as struggles of competing nationalities and language groups, of religions and tribes. And these self-same struggles can get caught up in the intrigues and imperial rivalries of powerful states who back one armed group against another.

THE US AND ITS “WAR ON TERROR”

Nothing illustrates this more than the USA claim that it is fighting a “War on Terror” – in which it is calling on all of us to align ourselves with the USA and the West and stigmatise Muslim people all over the world as ‘Islamic terrorists’.

And yet it was the USA that originally organised, trained and funded Islamist groups in Afghanistan when the US was fighting the Soviet Union. And the US funded and trained Islamist groups in Iran when there was a large Left and mass movement fighting the US’s ally – the Shah

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of Iran in the 1980s. And the main direct sponsor of the most extreme version of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ – Wahabiism – is the US’s ally and client state – Saudi Arabia.

In Syria the US has a contradictory relationship with its ruling elite under Bashir Assad: on the one hand supporting its repression of internal opposition but, on the other, stigmatising Assad’s regime because of its opposition to the US’s other great ally in the region – Israel. After the Arab Spring, we saw a tide of resistance against Assad arise in Syria, the US armed Islamic groups fighting Assad. The US’s ally, Turkey, however fears Kurdish groups seeking independence from Turkey so it supports rival groups. At one time the US was preparing to invade Syria but came up against Russian imperialism which is pro-Assad and supplies arms to Assad.

In West Africa, the US wants to establish a military base in a region which is rich in oil but where there are long-standing national struggles by groups opposed to the way imperialism constructed borders. In Nigeria groups in the North have long struggles for autonomy against the Southern Christian elite. But the bigger African powers, like South Africa – which is a supporter of the Nigerian elite but a competitor to US power on the African continent – are opposed to a US Military Command in West Africa. So groups which have a long history of struggles for greater autonomy of the Muslim, poorer North are now suddenly being roped into this inter-imperialist rivalry – like Boko Haram. Its acts of terror against Christian groups, girls and local villages are now being turned

by the USA into a justification for a US military presence in Nigeria – to “help Africa fight terror”.

THE UKRAINE AND INTER-IMPERIAL RIVALRY

Then there is the Ukraine where a popular uprising against the corruption of the Ukrainian elite has been turned into a war between Ukrainian-speaking people and Russian-speaking Ukrainians because the use wanted to use the uprising to justify establishing a NATO base on Russian border. Meanwhile a new Russian nationalist elite has seen how US corporations have taken over the old Eastern bloc countries and decided to get in there first. So now there is a threat of war in the Ukraine because of the rival imperial claims of the USA and Russia.

This is the fi rst of a new education series that will seek to understand this concept Imperialism, understand how it came about and look at various debates as to its meaning for understanding the world today.

Imperialism, globalisation and the state – understanding current debates

Theories of imperialism

Imperialism and War

Imperialism and South Africa, then and now – how we have used terms

Imperialism today

TO COME

UNITED STATES:

WORLD'S LARGEST

ARMY


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PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT (PEMO) UNITED FRONT (UF)

publicILRIG

forums 2015

Every month ILRIG hosts a public forum to create the space for activists from the labour and

social movements as well as other interested individuals to debate

current issues.

All public forums are held every last Thursday of the month at Community House, 41 Salt River Rd, Woodstock from 6 – 8.30 PM.

Transport home and refreshments are provided.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU

Now is the time to start building our new mass movement. Last year, ILRIG’s Educational Series focused on the historic forms that united fronts and people’s movements took. This month we start a new Education Series on Imperialism to bring to our readers a broader perspective on such forms of oppression that calls for liberation struggles. We hope this will deepen our discussions on the strategies and forms the emerging new movement should adopt.

Our vision is to interact with our readers on the shape of things to come. This is an appeal to you to join discussions on Facebook: ILRIG SA and Workers World News – as well as Twitter: #ILRIGSA. You can also write to the editors on [email protected].

We have also set aside a page for poetry, songs, reviews and readers’ comments. Please help us make this an inspiring space by sending us your contributions and views. Check out our website and join current deabtes: www.ilrig.org

NOTHING ABOUT US

WITHOUT US

26 february

Syriza: Radical left party wins in Greece.

What does this mean for us?

upcoming public forums

michael blake (ilrig)Andrew nash (UCT)

Activists from about 40 communities across South Africa resolved last year to unite their struggles to build a new movement. They launched a People’s Movement and have demarcated a Day of Mass Action on March 25, when they will march to municipalities countrywide to demand greater local government participation and electoral reform for a constituency-based system in time for the 2019 national and provincial elections.

NUMSA’s United Front launched a Preparatory Assembly in December as well as five provincial structures. The UF will embark on a Day of Mass Action on March 21, in defence of human rights, freedom of expression and the right to organise. National and provincial events to protest an expected “austerity” budget were held.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Documents

Wwn91 draft 3 final