SACP statement in solidarity with SABC workers facing retrenchment
19 January 2021
The South African Communist Party (SACP) stands in complete solidarity with all the SABC workers facing retrenchments. Our long-standing media transformation campaign has been inclusive, in pursuit of diversity, including but not limited to broadcasting and content production in the languages of the masses, adequately reflecting their progressive, and revolutionary, art and culture as the working-class, and in defence of their jobs as workers. Thus, the SACP supports the efforts made by trade unions at the SABC without exception. The unity of the labour movement in advancing workers’ common interests is essential. The SACP commends the trade unions at the SABC for forging their co-operation. We have been in ongoing contact with the Communications Workers Union (CWU), an affiliate of our ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), in this fight against the job bloodbath at the SABC.
The SACP supports the strike action planned for Wednesday, 20 January 2021, called by the CWU. The action will begin in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, and head to the Union Buildings in Tshwane, to deliver a memorandum to President Cyril Ramaphosa. In actively advancing our support, we will fully uphold the COVID-19 regulations to protect the supreme right to life. In the same manner, the SACP supports the strike action in other SABC regions countrywide.
The SABC, as a key source of information in South Africa and on the African continent, should be strengthened, instead of being weakened by retrenchments and privatisation. Now more than ever, as we face the crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, sky-rocketing unemployment, entrenching poverty, widening inequality, and other capitalist economic system hardships, including social distress, and the impact of climate change, we need the full capacity of the public broadcaster to be an active agent in public education and information sharing.
A countrywide immunisation programme, online educational support to learners and students, social advice and guidance to how to adjust our lives to the new living and working conditions, to mention just a few, all require a more capable, people-centred, and well-resourced public broadcaster. The SABC’s mandate calls for workers’ rights to be placed at the top of its priorities, and strengthening of its funding model, human and material capacity.
The SACP reiterates its warning, that any hollowing out of the SABC, including by means of retrenchments and neo-liberal restructuring, leading to its subordination to and exploitation by commercial interests, will negatively affect especially poor families and communities. Therefore, the SACP calls for broader working-class unity in the fight against the jobs bloodbath at the SABC and any privatisation drive. The transfer of a part of the SABC under section 197 of the Labour Relations Act to another “employer” is nothing but privatisation—a clear conveyance of that part of the SABC to profit-making interests to advance self-enrichment. The SACP will continue to stand firm against state capture, including the capture of public entities, even if that capture is facilitated piecemeal by piecemeal and dressed in a piece of legislation to give it legitimacy.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, SACP Central Committee Member, 19 January 2021
