The temperature of the class struggle is rising. 2022 has already seen a whole number of strikes. Some have been brief skirmishes as workers test their strength against the bosses. The strike wave is posing afresh many of the tactical and strategic issues facing the workers movement. None more so than the strike in Sibanye-Stillwater’s gold mines which ended in an important victory.
The MWP salutes the combativity, courage and determination of the Clover workers as their strike, enters its third month, against plant closures, retrenchments, salary cuts and degraded working conditions.
On Monday 4 October Gauteng EPWP workers will return to the CCMA in Pretoria. The Commission will hear the case on the March 2020 dismissal of over 3,000 workers by the ANC-run Gauteng Department of Infrastructure. The workers had been employed for seven years.
The Marxist Workers Party is marking the one year anniversary of the Gauteng Community Health Workers and EPWP workers’ march and sleep-over at Union Buildings. This took place on 12 and 13 February last year, during Ramaphosa’s 2020 “State of the Nation Address”. The action at Union Buildings last February was, we believe, the most significant workers’ movement event of 2020.
On 12 October the workers on the ANC government’s slave-labour Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) continued their struggle for permanent jobs and a living wage. Hundreds of EPWP workers took part in a day of action which was initiated by the National Union of Public Sector and Allied Workers (Nupsaw), an affiliate of the Saftu trade union federation.
Workers’ deepening anger and determination to fight back has compelled the Cosatu leadership to act despite its political entrapment in the Tripartite Alliance and their ANC loyalties. The MWP applauds Saftu’s support of a united front with Cosatu. It offers unity in struggle with the Cosatu rank-and-file, will sharpen the contradictions between Cosatu’s membership and leadership and offer them a way out of the Tripartite Alliance trap.
The Gauteng Government has given CHWs permanent jobs. The CHW’s victory shows that mass struggle works and that it is possible to win permanent jobs. The march to the Premier’s Office on Monday 12 October is for EPWP workers to demand exactly this.
The symbolic protests by left activists taking place on 1 August have been called because of a growing feeling that something must be done. If the ANC government is left in charge of managing the pandemic, if capitalism and the profit motive continue to determine what is, and what is not, ‘possible’, the working class is heading for disaster. The working class needs to take charge. But how can the mass of the working class be mobilised to do this? Because that is what it will take to switch tracks and avoid the oncoming train-smash.
The very system of tenders, whether they are technically corrupt or not, involves a massive diversion of wealth away from the working class and poor.
The fragmentation of the working class that is developing as a result of the jobs bloodbath needs to be stopped in its tracks with a programme of action that can unite the working class. The core idea must be that the working class will not be made to endure poverty because of capitalism’s crisis. The demand on the bosses and their politicians must be: JOBS FOR ALL! This must be accompanied by the demands that the SOCIAL RELIEF OF DISTRESS GRANT IS MADE PERMANENT AND INCREASED TO R3,500 PER MONTH and THE MINIMUM WAGE IS INCREASED TO R12,500 PER MONTH.
Copyright © 2026 | WordPress Theme by MH Themes
