Speech Delivered by COSATU President Sidumo Dlamini at the CEPPWAWU 4th National Congress held in Durban, August 31 2011
The President of CEPPWAWU, Comrade Jacob Mabena
The National Office bearers;
Members of the National Executive Committee
The entire leadership of CEPPWAWU from all levels of the organisation
We would like to convey our special greetings to the militant, fighting and non-compromising members of CEPPWAWU, who continue to keep employers on their toes, shivering when they hear the name CEPPWAWU.
Your resilience in the current strike action is a living testimony of your fighting spirit and revolutionary mettle that have continued to define this union throughout its history of struggle.
We salute the membership for keeping the flag of this great union flying high. Indeed you are the bedrock of this organisation.
The Central Executive Committee and the National Office Bearers said I must tell you that we are proud of you!
We want to remind the delegates and all the invited guests present here today that in the political DNA and blood system of this union flows the militancy of those who confronted the barrel of the gun and changed the course of history in the 1973 Durban Strikes.
In CEPPWAWU there is a combination of political and ideological dynamism and a sense of organisational excellence that can be traced from the experiences of the Chemical Workers Industrial Union and the Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union.
It was CWIU that led successful stayaways in the then PWV region in 1984 which disrupted SASOL that was completing a process of privatisation.
As we can all recall that at the time, SASOL was the pride and joy of whites patriotic to the Pretoria regime. It was a symbol of South African independence, it was South Africa's answer to the oil embargo and through struggles led by the forebears of this union the apartheid project was disrupted.
This is a living testimony of what community struggles can produce if properly coordinated with workers struggles and it is in CEPPWAWU that you can get a proper account of that experience.
It is not a mistake that most of the leaders who came from this union went on to be deployed for the most critical tasks of our revolution. It was the consistent organisational and financial stability of this union that made COSATU delegates to elect comrade Ronald Mofokeng as the National Treasurer of COSATU until he was deployed to parliament.
The former leaders of this union built it into a think-tank of strategy for the federation and a bulwark of war for the working class and the poor.
CEPPWAWU was at the forefront of the National Economic Forum processes which culminated in the formation of NEDLAC. It was the participation of this union's forbears in such structures as the NEF and ongoing participation in the National Manpower Commission, which gave labour an opportunity to enter negotiations about legislation, policies and economic vision of this country.
This union was the first to secure victory for the 40hr working week, the first union to win a R1 per hour salary demand. It is this union which led the Siyalala La campaigns.
The forbears of this union were serious about the revolution. It is they who articulated how we should engage foreign capital when they pointed out in one congress that the central issues with which to bind foreign capital should include the following:
a. The creation of employment,
b. Affirmative Action,
c. Respect for workers' rights, particularly emphasising ILO standards,
d. Training for skills impartation at the company cost,
e. Occupational health and safety, also by ILO standards,
f. Investment in technological development, whilst capacitating workers with necessary skills,
g. Corporate social responsibility.
Today many of these have become policy.
As we meet here today we must ask if the current generation of leaders of this union have kept up this glorious track record of organisation-building which is systematically knitted to actual working class struggles.
The fact of the matter is that with all this proud record of struggle, in the recent past CEPPWAWU has been riddled with organisational challenges which have created serious instability and defocused the union from its primary tasks of serving the membership.
This congress must confront these challenges and not be blinded with the task of electing leadership.
Such a leadership must be elected on the basis of an organisation-rebuilding programme, with clearly stated success indicators against which the leadership will from time to time account.
One of the things that this congress must also deal with is the constitution of CEPPWAWU, which I think is a product of compromises and consensus reached during the merger process in 1999. It has many overlaps and ambiguities which open up the organisation to abuse and other unnecessary problems.
Comrades we are concerned that more and more our unions get embroiled in internal conflict on matters that have nothing to do with the core business of the union.
At the centre of many of the challenges confronting our unions, CEPPWAWU included, is money.
Our unions have been changed from being instruments of war against capital into cash cows for individuals.
Today elections in unions are driven and dictated to by service providers based on financial interests.
Each group accuses the other of being corrupt so that they can get a chance to do the same, thinking that they will be more sophisticated than the other group.
Elections are more about a clarion call that "it is our time to eat" than a call to battle against capital.
Comrades let me remind you that this union belongs to the workers who wake up in the dark and chilly mornings to brave the cold weather and merciless criminals so that they can be exploited and take a fraction of their hard-earned money to pay subscriptions. When you abuse that money in whatever form, you must know it represents the izinyembezi zabasebenzi!
These investment companies which we formed are not for the leadership but are supposed to provide resources at the service of advancing our revolutionary cause. They are funded by monies that belong to the workers. When you use them for your own personal benefit as leaders you must know that they represent izinyembezi zabasenzi!
Comrades, we have been observing with pain how this union was being destroyed and corroded from within because of leadership infighting which has been extended to the membership.
Comrades it is a known fact that no divided class-based formation can ever be taken serious by its class adversaries. Our choice is to use this congress as a launch pad to build CEPPWAWU or allow its perpetual self-destruction. But history will give its own judgement to all of us, as this generation of leadership which consciously gave the revolutionary baton to its class enemies to run with it.
There is a class battle out there, which we must win. The whole society and the working class in particular have pinned their hopes on all of us here. We have a duty to inspire hope to our people. The unemployed, hungry and poverty-stricken youth that we see on the streets everyday look up to us for answers.
We want CEPPWAWU to provide creative answers to these challenges. For example we know that the petrochemicals sector has a huge potential. We have already identified Sasol as strategic and therefore it needs to be nationalised.
Sasol produces important inputs for industrial processes, agriculture and construction, particularly cement production. It also produces fuel, has strategic refining and controls strategic transport infrastructure for fuel and gas.
Sasol also depends heavily on Eskom for electricity supply; its processes are highly energy-intensive and it also relies on mining, especially coal mining, as a critical input.
This is one area that can be creatively and revolutionary turned around to create employment opportunities and provide revenue required to advance our development agenda.
We also know that the forestry sector provides paper, furniture and inputs to sectors such as mining. Wood and wood products, paper and paper products are crucial for social delivery: e.g. paper and books are critical inputs in the education system and furniture is important for decent housing, etc.
The forestry sector uses a scarce and critical national resource and because of this reason the people as a whole must extract maximum benefit from this sector.
Private ownership, let alone internationalised ownership, is not in the interest of our national development. The sector is also dominated by a few large firms: Mondi and SAPPI. In our view CEPPWAWU must lead the campaign to ensure that this sector contributes in advancing the development agenda of the country particularly in job creation.
The pharmaceutical sector is also a strategic sector but which is dominated by a few large players and plays an important role in the health system, particularly in the context rolling out the NHI.
In our view, as part of addressing health disparities, a state-owned pharmaceutical company needs to be set up in order to produce medicines on a non-profit basis. This is important, especially in the light of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the vulnerability of the Southern African region to diseases.
We would like to commend the ANC and government for the move to establish a state pharmaceutical company. This will put our country in a powerful position to have an impact on the health profile of the Southern African population, not just South Africans, and will reduce the vulnerability of the region from being exploited by multinational pharmaceutical companies.
We are calling on CEPPWAWU to actively participate in this discussion that seeks to influence the growth and development path of our country. We need answers to the burning questions of development confronting our country.
If we, as the progressive forces, cannot provide answers to our people, they will turn to the DA and the demagogues who will promise them short-cut answers when their real agenda is to tap their anger and energy for use against the democratic popular government.
One practical example is what we have been observing happening around Luthuli House. Our youth are pulled by all sorts of questionable forces and we need to find ways to isolate the agenda that seeks to set the movement against its own people.
We are observing the ANC disciplinary process with interest and we want to commend the ANC leadership for acting within the parameters of their own constitutional processes, not based on pressure from any quarter which may have devious motives.
As COSATU we have a responsibility to ensure that the leadership that came out from Polokwane succeeds in implementing the programme that was its outcome. We must therefore expose any agenda that seeks to blacken these leaders into political timidity and paralysis. Already, when we went to Polokwane, we said that there were those who only wanted to get enough space to accumulate in the same way as the previous grouping was doing.
Comrades our recent 5th Central Committee said we have spoken enough; we have used every platform to provide statistics which demonstrate glaring evidence of the extent of poverty, unemployment and inequality. Now is the time to act!
The Central committee adopted 11 campaigns which include the Living Wage campaign, the campaign against labour brokers, the anti-Walmart campaign, public transport, COP17, water, new growth path, anti-privatisation, electricity, anti-corruption and instilling revolutionary public service ethos.
The recent CEC said that in order to effectively co-ordinate these campaigns, we should establish a Campaigns Operations Command Centre and a Living Wage Campaign Commission and we have convened a meeting of all affiliates' General Secretaries, campaigns coordinators from our structures including from provinces to attend the first meeting on 9th September.
We are now gearing for action as instructed by the central committee. On 5th October we will have the mother of all marches in all the major cities throughout the country to make a call that labour brokers must be banned!
We expect CEPPWAWU to come out in numbers, because we know that in the chemical sector labour brokers have found a heaven and are having a field day in almost all the industries in which you organise.
Our negotiators have been at NEDLAC, only to discover that business has sent labour brokers to negotiate with us. We have stopped it. But we are even more disturbed by the fact that FEDUSA is happy with labour brokers and every time business speaks at NEDLAC, FEDUSA representatives are the first to say they happy. This must tell you more about the class position of FEDUSA members and their leaders.
As COSATU we call on all the three federations to act together in the fight against Labour Brokers but if FEDUSA is closer to the labour brokers than workers we will only rely on NACTU with whom we share similar historical realities of racial exploitation and the pain of job reservation.
Comrades these campaigns are a concentrated expression of the class battles we cannot afford to lose and CEPPWAWU must use this Congress to sharpen itself for war.
We need a strong CEPPWAWU for all these campaigns!
May this congress bring renewed hope to our people!
Amandla!
Issued by COSATU, August 31 2011
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