THE South African 300,000-strong National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has called a one-day solidarity strike with the 1.3m public sector trade unionists who have been on strike since August 19.
The mineworkers’ union declared: ‘The NUM fully supports the public sector strike and would next week Thursday ensure that every mining operation, every construction site and every energy worker joins the public sector strike in different forms.’
This was the response of the largest union in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to the call made by its General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, for all trade unionists to take solidarity strike action with the civil servants next Thursday. The COSATU leader told more than 10,000 striking public service workers in Johannesburg on Thursday: ‘Everything will come to a standstill’.
He said: ‘Today, on 26 August, all Cosatu unions will be organising all their workers to issue notices to employers that they will be joining the public sector strike.’ Vavi said that, alongside the public sector workers, work would also halt in the key mining and manufacturing industries. ‘We will not be defeated,’ he declared.
Thousands of municipal workers defied a court order and staged a one-day sympathy strike yesterday that slowed garbage collection in major cities, while unions representing the police and the military have already said they will join in the stoppage. Following the NUM’s example, it is expected that more than two million trade unionists affiliated to COSATU will come out on September 2.
The NUM’s action will deliver a powerful blow against the ruling class and President Jacob Zuma’s ANC bourgeois government, because it organises workers in the mining, construction and electrical industries. Mining accounts for 5-6% of South Africa’s GDP and a strike would hit multinationals, like Anglo Platinum.
The public sector strike and the solidarity general strike called by COSATU is producing a huge political crisis for Zuma and the ANC government, because COSATU is part of the governing tripartite alliance, alongside the ANC and the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP).
The ANC government is dictating a 6% pay rise and 700 rand housing allowance, in response to the unions’ claim for an 8.6% rise and 1,000 rand allowance. To impose this on the working class, Zuma has used troops from the South African Defence Force (SADF) against healthcare workers in 37 hospitals.
At last Thursday’s rally, COSATU leader Vavi said South Africa was ‘heading rapidly in the direction of a full-blown predator state, in which a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas increasingly controls the state as a vehicle for accumulation’. He added that the tripartite alliance had entered ‘paralysis’ and was ‘dysfunctional’.
While there is a growing split between the ANC and the COSATU trade unions, the Stalinists support Zuma and are part of the ANC government. Both Blade Nzimande, the SACP General Secretary, and Jeremy Cronin, his deputy, serve as Government Ministers.
Cronin has said: ‘I don’t think there were huge expectations about what could happen, the space is not necessarily huge for some dramatic leap leftwards. What one hopes for and what’s immediately possible are not necessarily the same thing.’
The 1.3m civil servants and other public sector workers know they are engaged in a political strike against their employer, the ANC government. COSATU’s strike will be a political general strike.
Such a political struggle to defeat the ANC government and the Stalinists demands a new political leadership, a revolutionary workers party with a socialist programme.
This is the time to build up the forces of the section of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International in South Africa. Its task is to organise and lead the working class in the revolutionary struggle to bring down the ANC regime and replace it with a workers’ and small farmers’ government.
Such a government will nationalise the banks, mines and major industries, putting them under workers’ control, redistribute the land, implement a huge public works programme of house building, and water and electricity infrastructure projects to provide jobs for the unemployed, and index link pay to the cost of living.
