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Volume 11, No. 8, 8 March 2012 |
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Red Alert SACP message to the COSATU march on 7 March 2012 |
SACP message to the COSATU march on 7 March 2012
Why the SACP is against Labour Brokers
Phantsi Labour brokering! Phantsi!
The SACP is in full solidarity with its alliance partner, COSATU, and in full support of the workers' struggle to end the abusive, modern-day slavery practice of labour brokering. Labour brokers stand between the workers and decent work. At the heart of our struggle against labour brokers is our decades long fight against cheap labour and the super-exploitation of especially the black working class, a struggle we have consistently waged for the 9 decades of the existence of the SACP.
The scourge of labour brokers is a continuation of a long colonial and apartheid practice of cheap labour and prevention of blacks from doing certain jobs. Although labour brokering affects all workers today, irrespective of race, it is still black workers who bear most of the brunt of this highly exploitative practice. The youth in particular is the most affected.
We say YES to equal pay for equal work.
We say NO to casualisation and forced temporary work.
After our collective victory of 1994, the ANC-led alliance successfully introduced progressive labour market legislation - the Labour Relations Act (LRA), the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, and many other laws that protect worker safety and health.
But the capitalist bosses have not watched these advances with folded arms. They have continued to wage a fierce class battle to undermine our democratic advances.
A major weapon that they have used has been labour brokering.
After 1994, and particularly over the last decade - the number of labour brokers in SA has multiplied a hundred-fold - like locusts swarming across our land. This has been the response of the capitalist profit-seeking blood-suckers to roll-back our democratic and worker advances.
We demand that government remove this scourge. We demand that the abusive practice of labour brokering is banned. Labour brokering has no place in a modern democracy.
However, the SACP is also of the view that the struggle against labour brokers must also be intensified in the workplaces where this practice is found. The struggle against labour brokers must not only be limited to once off actions, important as these maybe, but must be fought daily. It must also include exposing, naming and shaming companies using labour brokers, including beneficiaries of this practice, whether outside or inside our ranks, as well as those amongst us who benefit from this, either directly or indirectly through close family business interests.
The SACP says: Stop spending billions of rands on infrastructure for the rich!
The R20 billion Gauteng e-Tolling project is yet another example of billions of rands being spent on the wrong priorities.
The public transport that workers depend upon - minibuses, buses and Metrorail - is often inaccessible, unsafe, over-crowded and expensive. Our township roads are often pot-holed. Our rural roads and bridges become dangerous when it rains.
But what has government done? Instead of focusing on infrastructure that is used by the working class and poor - government has gone and spent R20 billion on widening 180 kilometres in the wealthiest province of our country, on freeways that are used mainly by the rich in their private cars.
The SACP says: spend our tax-payers' money on public transport - not infrastructure for the rich.
The SACP says: spend our tax-payers' money on township infrastructure, on rural infrastructure, on the social needs of the workers and the poor.
Building on advances and gains of the working class
It is nevertheless important that as we wage these struggles against modern day slave owners, we do not lose sight of the many gains we have made as the working class in the recent period. For instance, the major announcements made by President Zuma on a multi-billion rand plan to invest in infrastructure is a major gain for the workers and the poor of our country.
The infrastructure projects have the potential of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. It has been one of our major campaigns for government to massively invest in infrastructure, in order to create labour intensive jobs, as well as other forms of sustainable livelihoods. As Cosatu and the SACP we must welcome this and seek to support government in this regard.
We must never allow our challenges to blind us from our advances and gains!
However the biggest threat to the benefits for our people from the major state-led infrastructural investment projects are tenderpreneurs and labour brokers. Tenderpreneurs are eyeing tenders through shoddy companies that do poor quality work or seek to capture these tenders corruptly for their selfish accumulation interests. It is therefore important for workers and the working class as a whole to be in the forefront in ensuring that this infrastructure spend does indeed benefits ordinary workers and the poor. Hence the necessity to intensify the struggle against corruption through mass activism by the workers.
The other threat to workers fully benefitting from this infrastructure spend would obviously be labour brokers. Failure to directly employ workers in these projects would mean that millions of rands line the pockets of labour brokers through the amount of money they deduct from workers' sweat. Labour brokers specialize in buying and selling human beings, from which they make filthy profits without doing any work. Perhaps we should take our struggle to higher levels by insisting that those benefitting from government tenders mustn't use labour brokers!
In fact there is very little difference between tendepreneurs and labour brokers. The one seek tenders through corrupt means, the others steal workers' wages without doing any work.
The other ways through which labour brokers undermine workers and the development of our economy is through lack of training for most workers employed by labour brokers. Employers do not invest in training these workers because they are not permanent and are not employed by them. On the other hand labour brokers are more interested in selling these workers to employers without any investment in their training, because they abandon many of them if they can no longer sell them. Labour broking undermines one of government's major priorities, to create a skilled and capable workforce.
Expose and Defeat Liberals and other political opportunists
As we embark upon this action, it is also important that we make certain things clear. We must dismiss all those who see this action as a strike against the ANC government or the current leadership of the ANC. Such opportunists have no place inside our own ranks.
So should we expose the liberals (AMAVEL'ESHONA) who pretend to support workers and the poor opportunistically? They see themselves as allies on matters that suit them, but oppose the core struggle of the workers against labour brokers and super-exploitation. That is why the working class must at all times be vigilant against such 'friends'. Liberals like the DA and their ilk can never ever be friends of the workers. That is why liberals have sought to form what they call civil society coalitions mainly to oppose our government, but they will never form civil society coalitions against labour brokers, casualisation, and retrenchments, as we have seen it today.
Let the working class take responsibility for our revolution, protect its gains and confront challenges!
Succession battles at leading SA newspaper
Umsebenzi Online is in possession of dramatic new evidence of a deepening factional battle within one of SA's leading weekly newspapers, the Mail & Guardian. The dispute concerns the M&G's long-running, money-spinning soap opera, The Succession Game. Ironically, the dispute itself revolves around succession. Heated debates have been raging in the newsroom as to who or what should replace the soapie's leading character - the much loved and much hated "Julius Malema" (the fictional soap opera character, of course, not the actual person with the same name).
At the time of going to press, Umsebenzi Online was threatened with being taken to the Press Ombudsman. Knowing the Ombud's fierce reputation for tough action against the media, we took this threat particularly seriously. However, we have chosen not to be intimidated. We are invoking "public interest" and in full support of the Right2Know campaign, we have decided to proceed with publication.
For some months now, it has been clear that all is not well over at 195 Jan Smuts Avenue (the M&G's "Luthuli House"). According to "several different", "well-placed sources", "close to the contending factions" (we apologise to readers for using these hackneyed phrases, indicating that what we are about to say may or may not be a thumb-suck based on idle gossip) the dispute is between an older generation, grouped around the incumbent editor, Nic Dawes, and a group of Young Turks. According to at least one "well-placed source", the ring-leader of the Young Turks is Matuma Letsoalo. We have been unable to independently confirm this allegation and attempts to contact Letsoalo (five minutes before going online) were unsuccessful.
In the leaked document in Umsebenzi Online's possession (which can be obtained by going into the local Spar and purchasing last week's edition of the M&G) signs of this hitherto undisclosed factional battle are in evidence all over the first few pages. The dispute concerns whether and, if so, with whom to replace the star of their soap-opera series. According to our sources, the Daws faction is said to be strongly in favour of the unions, while the Young Turks are supporting a shadowy grouping known as the Ghost of Malema.
The head-line on last week's M&G front-page (space controlled by the Daws faction) reads: "Never mind Malema, here come the unions". Below the headline are two photos - one of a funeral for Julius Malema (the soap opera character), and the other of COSATU's general secretary and president, in the company of President Zuma, toasting the opening of COSATU's new head-office building.
However, while the Daws faction is said to be firmly in control of the front-page, the political reporting on pages three and four in the leaked document are clearly contested. "Anti-Zuma forces regroup" is the headline on a page three report written by Letsoalo and Andisiwe Makinana (said to be part of the Letsoalo faction). While the head-line (presumably written by the Daws faction) is ambivalent, the body of the story itself is clearly NOT punting the trade unions, but the mysterious Ghost of Malema grouping.
Further evidence of tensions at 195 Jan Smuts Avenue can be found in the second story at the foot of page three. Reliable sources inform us that the Daws faction cunningly instructed Letsoalo to write a story on their own favoured option - namely that the unions would be the new major character to succeed the fictional Malema in the current series of The Succession Game. Letsoalo went through the motions of sketching out this scenario, but deliberately sabotaged it. This forced the Daws faction to provide a hesitant headline to the story: "Cosatu refrains from ANC succession debate - for now".
Umsebenzi Online spoke to two well-known, dial-a-quote, soap opera specialists - Aubrey Habib and Eusebius Mashele. Both confirm that bitter internal disputes like this are relatively frequent in media houses. "It goes with the territory", Aubrey Habib told us. "This is why journalists are so opposed to public scrutiny of what goes on in-house."
According to Eusebius Mashele: "Anyone familiar with soap operas, like The Bold and the Beautiful, will know that from time to time a leading character gets written out of the story, usually by way of a life-threatening disease or mysterious disappearance." Typically the actual cause behind a character's disappearance is a contractual dispute between the actor in question and the profit-maximising production house. In the current case, however, falling readership numbers are thought to be the main reason why the Daws faction wants the Malema character dropped. Growing public boredom with the Malema persona and the increasingly melodramatic lines scripted for this lead character by a desperate Letsoalo faction have apparently begun to take their toll.
Eusebius Mashele notes that when a former lead character in a soap opera requires side-lining, then two things immediately become necessary. "In the first place, the script-writers have to scurry away to invent a new leading protagonist to sustain viewer interest. In the second place, soap operas seldom entirely kill off their leading characters. Who knows, with the side-lining of a character that everyone once loved to hate, viewer numbers might crash even further. For this reason, soap operas are full of miraculous, Lazarus-like resurrections from the dead. Wise production houses will always leave the option of such a miracle open." But this is not always an easy choice, particularly if, for reasons beyond the control of the production house, the actor playing the character is simply no longer available.
According to Eusebius Mashele: "Last week's M&G scriptwriters were doing their best to cover both of these bases - inventing a new leading persona, while keeping open the option of resurrecting the previous one, if not literally, then at least as a kind of spectral presence to be flighted as the real force behind the outgoing character - what Kryptonite was to Superman."
Aubrey Habib agrees with this analysis. "In fact, the factional battles going on at 195 Jan Smuts Avenue are precisely over which of the two options should be most energetically pursued. Isn't ironic? What we have here is a succession battle going on in mid-series within The Succession Game itself! Strange how journalists can sometimes imitate a soap opera."
Aubrey Habib doesn't entirely rule out the possibility that the factional disputes are just a publicity stunt. However, Umsebenzi Online has it on good authority that the tensions are real enough and that they have been long-running. The effort put into a cover-up for many months now would suggest that this is no ordinary publicity stunt.
Eusebius Mashele points to another interesting feature in the leaked document. "Most of the best soap-opera scriptwriters draw heavily from their own personal experience and imagination. Words and phrases on the lips of a screen character are often drawn directly from a scriptwriter's own immediate issues", he notes. "Letsoalo is widely credited for being one of the leading brains behind the invention of the Malema character. It's no surprise that he should continue to be exploring the possibilities of developing a new Malema-esque persona."
The impending non-availability of the actor playing the Malema character in the M&G's The Succession Game, has set the cat among the pigeons at the production house. But notice how Letsoalo cleverly fictionalizes this challenge and reassures viewers in the script of last week's episode: "Some of Jacob Zuma's opponents within the ANC ["within the M&G"?] spent the weeks leading up to Julius Malema's expulsion from the party", he writes, "preparing the ground for a broader coalition to contend for top posts...while national attention was focused on Malema [i.e. focused by earlier episodes of the M&G itself] a lobby group [met] behind closed doors...ANC sources close to the lobby group [i.e. the Letsoalo faction at the M&G] ...have held several meetings in an undisclosed place in Johannesburg over the past few months."
As least one of our informants reads these lines as a clear indication that there are now parallel structures operating within the M&G. The informant believes that the reference to "several meetings in an undisclosed place in Johannesburg" is, in fact, a coded challenge to the authority of the incumbent editorial hierarchy.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. With or without the factional battles raging at 195 Jan Smuts Avenue, with its former lead "baddie" now seemingly out of the picture, the M&G's chart-topping Succession Game is in grave trouble. As the smirking JR Ewing character of Dallas fame liked to say with a thick Texan drawl: "Those who horse around with shower-room humour are prone to slip on their own soapies."
