From Victory to Organisation — Build a United Campaign Against Precarious Work
The victory of the 1,224 Gauteng EPWP workers brings this series back to where it began. After seven years of struggle, workers whom the state had dismissed and expected to disappear into the vast sea of unemployment succeeded, through organisation, mobilisation and determined legal struggle, in forcing a retreat. The award of six months’ compensation for their unfair dismissal represents an important victory, but it does not resolve the contradiction that gave birth to the campaign. The work they performed was continuing and socially necessary, while the workers themselves were treated as temporary and disposable.
The central demand therefore remains unfinished: work of a permanent nature must be performed by permanently employed workers.
The significance of the victory reaches far beyond the workers directly involved. Millions of workers move between unemployment, temporary contracts, labour brokers, outsourced employment and public employment programmes such as the EPWP and CWP, while millions more remain permanently locked out of employment. The experience of the EPWP struggle shows that these workers can be organised and that, once organised, they can become a powerful force in the struggle to rebuild the workers’ movement.
The task now is to generalise that experience into a wider campaign against precarious work and unemployment and for the rebuilding of the public services and infrastructure upon which the working class depends.
Mass Unemployment Alongside Enormous Unmet Need
South Africa’s unemployment catastrophe has become a permanent feature of life under capitalism. In the second quarter of 2026, the official unemployment rate stood at 33.6%, with 8.5 million people officially unemployed. Millions more who wanted work were excluded from this narrow definition. Yet this enormous reservoir of unused human labour exists alongside equally enormous unmet social needs.
Across working-class communities, municipal infrastructure is deteriorating. Water and sanitation systems require expansion, repair and maintenance; roads and public facilities deteriorate; refuse collection and other basic municipal functions buckle under financial and organisational crises. Hospitals and clinics require more health workers and functioning infrastructure. Schools require teachers, administrators, cleaners, maintenance and support workers. The housing backlog continues to grow, while new housing itself requires roads, electricity, water, sanitation, schools, clinics, recreational facilities and public transport.
The unemployment crisis and the crisis of public services are therefore inseparable. Millions of people need work at the same time as an enormous amount of socially necessary work remains undone. The workers capable of performing that labour exist alongside the communities desperately requiring its results.
This contradiction exposes the real character of the unemployment crisis. South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of work that needs doing or from a shortage of people capable of doing it. The obstacle lies in an economy incapable of mobilising its enormous human and material resources according to social need.
The EPWP illustrates the contradiction particularly sharply. Instead of developing the permanent public capacity required to meet permanent social needs, the state periodically employs a fraction of the unemployed through temporary programmes, pays poverty wages and eventually returns workers to unemployment, even though the work remains.
A country with permanent needs requires permanent workers. The struggle against unemployment must therefore become a struggle for a massive programme of permanent, socially useful public employment: building houses and schools, expanding healthcare, repairing and extending municipal infrastructure and developing the services required by a growing population.
Permanent work must mean permanent employment.
Blaming the Victims of the Crisis
The persistence of mass unemployment on this scale requires an ideological explanation that shifts responsibility away from the organisation of the economy itself. The unemployed are therefore repeatedly told that they lack education, skills, experience, entrepreneurial initiative or the correct attitude towards work. Young people who have spent years searching unsuccessfully for their first job are sent through repeated training and “employability” programmes, as though millions of individual deficiencies could explain a social catastrophe affecting an entire generation.
Education and training are essential to developing society’s productive capacities and enabling workers to exercise greater control over their working lives. They cannot, however, manufacture jobs that the economy does not create. A million workers competing for a fraction of that number of vacancies cannot solve unemployment by improving a million CVs.
The same inversion appears in the treatment of public-sector workers. When schools struggle to overcome the enormous inequalities confronting working-class children, teachers are denounced as lazy, incompetent or inadequately trained. When hospitals and clinics buckle under shortages of staff, equipment and medicines, health workers become the target of public frustration. When municipal services deteriorate, municipal workers are blamed while vacancies, deteriorating infrastructure, outsourcing and chronic financial crises disappear from the explanation.
The victims of the crisis are made responsible for the conditions produced by the system itself.
This serves a definite purpose. Once unemployment has been transformed into a problem of the unemployed worker’s qualifications or attitude, the organisation of the economy escapes scrutiny. Once deteriorating education can be blamed upon teachers, the shortage of posts, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate infrastructure recede from view. Once failing municipal services are blamed upon supposedly bloated public-sector employment, cutting expenditure and employment can be presented as the cure for a crisis aggravated by precisely those policies.
The struggle against precarious work must therefore challenge the ideas used to divide employed workers from the unemployed and public servants from the communities they serve. Their interests are bound together by the same struggle for employment, functioning public services and the resources necessary to provide them.
There Is Money — the Question Is Where It Goes
Workers demanding permanent employment, communities demanding services and trade unions demanding that vacant posts be filled are repeatedly confronted with the same answer: government cannot afford it.
The public finances reveal a more complicated reality.
The 2026/27 national budget provides R432.4 billion for debt-service costs. That is more than the R310.4 billion allocated to health and represents an enormous claim upon public resources before a nurse is employed, a house built, a leaking water system repaired or an unemployed worker given a job.
The debt we are told cannot simply be wished away is itself the product of political and economic choices. Corporate taxation has been progressively reduced over the decades, enabling corporations to retain as private profit revenue upon which the state previously relied to fund social expenditure. To compensate for lower tax revenue, government resorts to borrowing from the domestic and international money markets. Those loans must then be serviced with interest, and debt-service obligations are prioritised to avoid default, credit-rating downgrades and further pressure on the currency.
Today, an enormous share of the annual budget is absorbed by interest payments. To meet these obligations, government constrains social spending. This is what lies behind the obscure language of “fiscal responsibility”. The state transfers an increasing share of public resources into private hands while simultaneously insisting that the public purse cannot sustain the employment and services society requires.
The scale of debt servicing demonstrates that arguments about what the country can “afford” are inseparable from decisions about whose claims upon society’s resources take priority. Payments to creditors are treated as unavoidable obligations while employment, housing, healthcare, education and municipal services are continually required to retreat before fiscal constraints.
The working class must demand that this direction be reversed through substantially higher taxation of corporate profits and accumulated wealth. But taxation is only part of the question. Vast amounts of public money already allocated to providing services are channelled through systems of outsourcing, labour broking and tendering that create opportunities for private profit before the needs of workers and communities have been met.
Cut Out the Middlemen — Rebuild Public Capacity
Outsourcing does not abolish the cost of providing a public service. Labour broking does not abolish the cost of employing labour. Tendering does not make roads, houses, school maintenance or municipal services appear without expenditure. These arrangements change the route through which public money reaches the service and, in doing so, create space for private accumulation between the public purse and the work being performed.
A worker directly employed by a municipality, hospital or government department becomes part of the permanent capacity of that public institution. When the same function is outsourced, public money must pay for the service while simultaneously providing the revenue from which the contractor extracts its profit. When workers are supplied through labour brokers, the workers perform the labour while the broker derives income from standing between them and the institution requiring their work.
The tender system has extended the same logic throughout the public sector. Functions that could be developed as permanent public capacity are repeatedly contracted to private companies, creating an entire layer of businesses whose accumulation depends upon access to public expenditure. The phenomenon of the politically connected tenderpreneur is therefore more than a question of individual corruption. It has flourished upon a system that has transformed the provision of public goods and services into opportunities for private enrichment.
This does not mean that every service or product required by the state should be produced internally. There will be specialised, occasional or highly specific requirements where external procurement is genuinely more economical and rational. But this exception has been turned on its head. Outsourcing and tendering have penetrated functions that are permanent, predictable and essential to the daily operation of the public sector.
The consequences are visible in the public accounts. The Auditor-General reported R42.58 billion in irregular expenditure across national and provincial government in 2024/25, driven principally by procurement and contract-management failures. In local government, the Auditor-General has repeatedly documented enormous losses through poor financial management, weak procurement controls, fruitless expenditure, delayed infrastructure projects and failures to obtain value from money already spent.
Irregular expenditure should not automatically be equated with theft: it includes expenditure where required procurement and other procedures were not followed and does not by itself establish that the entire amount was lost. But the scale of procurement failure demonstrates how vulnerable a heavily tenderised state becomes to waste, manipulation and corruption.
Privatisation multiplies the points at which public money meets private commercial interests. Every outsourced function and tender creates another contractual relationship requiring monitoring, another opportunity for inflated prices and collusion, and another private interest seeking to maintain its access to the public purse.
The workers’ movement must demand that this flow of resources be reversed. Labour broking must be abolished. Permanent public functions must be insourced. Unnecessary tendering must end. Money lost through corruption must be recovered from those responsible, fruitless and wasteful expenditure eliminated, and the resources released redirected towards permanent employment and the reconstruction of public services.
Where Will the Money Come From?
The answer begins with the resources society already possesses.
End the drain through labour brokers and unnecessary outsourcing. Build permanent state capacity instead of repeatedly paying contractors to perform continuing public functions. Recover public money lost through corruption and prosecute those responsible. Eliminate fruitless and wasteful expenditure. Increase taxation on corporate profits and the accumulated wealth of the rich. Redirect resources towards permanent employment and social provision rather than forcing these needs continually to retreat before debt servicing and austerity.
These measures can release substantial resources for an immediate programme of employment and reconstruction and begin shifting the burden of the crisis away from the working class and towards those who possess the greatest wealth.
Yet the struggle to implement them inevitably raises a deeper question. South Africa’s wealth is overwhelmingly produced collectively by workers, but the decisive productive resources of society remain privately owned and controlled. Investment decisions, the allocation of capital and the employment of labour are consequently governed by the requirements of profitability rather than through a democratic assessment of what society requires.
The demand for jobs therefore begins to collide with the ownership and control of the economy itself.
Organise the Unorganised
Changing these priorities requires organisation capable of confronting the social forces that benefit from them.
The EPWP campaign demonstrated what becomes possible when workers whom precarious employment has scattered begin to organise collectively. This lesson must be extended throughout the labour movement. Trade unions cannot confine their organisational horizons to those workers fortunate enough still to possess conventional permanent employment while millions move continually between unemployment, temporary contracts, outsourcing, labour brokers and public employment programmes.
A worker’s employment status may change; their class position does not.
The trade union movement must throw open its doors to EPWP, CWP, CHW, ECD, outsourced, labour-broker, contract and other precarious workers. Retrenched workers should retain their membership and democratic rights under the principle “once a member, always a member”, while unemployed-worker and unemployed-youth structures should be built in working-class communities and linked to the organised labour movement.
Such organisation strengthens permanently employed workers as well. Every layer employed at lower wages and inferior conditions can be used to undermine collectively negotiated wages and conditions elsewhere. Outsourcing deliberately fragments workers performing interconnected functions into different employers, contracts and bargaining arrangements. Labour broking institutionalises insecurity and strengthens the threat of replacement.
The millions of precarious and unorganised workers are therefore not a burden standing outside the trade union movement. They constitute a vast reserve of working-class power waiting to be organised.
Different Conditions — a Common Struggle
A united campaign cannot be built by imposing an identical list of demands upon workers confronting different conditions. Health workers must begin from the conditions in hospitals, clinics and community healthcare; education workers from vacancies, overcrowding and deteriorating school infrastructure; municipal workers and communities from the collapse of water, sanitation, electricity, refuse collection and local infrastructure. Housing, construction and other sectors will generate their own concrete demands.
These sectoral struggles can become tributaries feeding a common movement.
Health workers fighting for permanent employment and adequate staffing share an objective interest with patients requiring functioning clinics. Municipal workers fighting for properly staffed permanent maintenance teams share an interest with communities living with collapsing water and sewage infrastructure. Construction workers demanding socially useful permanent employment can find common cause with communities requiring houses and the infrastructure necessary to sustain them.
The connection between workers and communities therefore rests upon material interests rather than simply appeals for sympathy. Better jobs and better services can become parts of the same struggle.
Worker-and-community action committees can give this unity organisational form, bringing together permanent and precarious workers, organised and unorganised workers, unemployed workers and representatives of working-class communities around concrete local needs. Such structures should be democratically constituted, with elected representatives accountable to mass meetings, mandated by those they represent and subject to recall.
Beginning with the conditions workers and communities confront, these committees can identify work that needs doing, vacancies that should be filled, services requiring expansion, functions that should be insourced and public resources being diverted through unnecessary contracts. Local and sectoral structures can then coordinate across workplaces, communities and industries, developing towards provincial and national organisation as the campaign grows.
A Programme for Jobs, Services and Permanent Employment
A united campaign against precarious work and unemployment should fight for:
- Permanent work — permanent employment. Make EPWP, CWP, CHW, ECD and other workers performing continuing work permanent.
- A living wage and equal pay and conditions for work of equal value, with full trade-union and collective-bargaining rights regardless of contractual status.
- Abolish labour broking and insource permanent functions. End outsourcing and tendering where work can effectively and economically be performed directly by the state. No contract should be used to replace permanent employment, cut wages or evade collectively negotiated conditions.
- Fill necessary vacant public-sector posts and launch a massive programme of permanent public employment to build housing and expand and maintain schools, clinics, hospitals, roads, water, sanitation, electricity, public transport and other infrastructure required by the population.
- Make the corporations and wealthy pay. Increase taxation of corporate profits and accumulated wealth and redirect resources towards employment, services and infrastructure.
- End waste, corruption and tender profiteering. Recover stolen public resources, prosecute those responsible and open public expenditure and contracts to democratic scrutiny by workers and communities.
- Once a member, always a member. Retrenched workers must retain union membership and democratic rights; unemployed workers and youth must be organised in community structures linked to the labour movement.
- Build democratically elected worker-and-community action committees to coordinate struggles across workplaces, sectors and communities and exercise working-class oversight over public employment and resources.
- For democratic working-class ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy, laying the basis for socialist planning according to social need.
From Immediate Demands to Socialist Transformation
The working class should struggle for every improvement that can be wrested from the present system. But the programme cannot stop at rearranging items within the state budget.
Higher corporate taxation, the abolition of labour broking, insourcing, recovering stolen public money and redirecting expenditure towards jobs and services inevitably confront the economic power of the capitalist class. The corporations that dominate mining, finance, industry, construction, retail and the other decisive sectors of the economy make investment decisions according to the returns available to their owners. Capital can be withheld, moved across borders or withdrawn from production when measures threaten profitability. The wealth upon which society depends remains concentrated in private hands and protected by capitalist property relations.
This is why the contradiction between mass unemployment and enormous unmet social need cannot finally be resolved through a better tender system, more efficient administration or even a more progressive budget. Such measures can improve the position of the working class and should be fought for, but they leave intact the economic power that continually reproduces inequality, unemployment and the subordination of human need to profit.
The commanding heights of the economy — the banks, mines and major industries — must be taken out of the hands of the capitalist class and placed under democratic working-class ownership and control. On that basis, the enormous productive capacity of society, together with the skills and labour of millions presently excluded from production, could be organised through a democratically planned socialist economy.
The starting point of such an economy would be transformed. Housing would be built because people require homes. Hospitals and clinics would be staffed because people require healthcare. Schools would be expanded because children require education. Infrastructure would be built and maintained because society requires it. Work would be shared and organised according to the productive capacity of society and the needs of its population.
The struggle that began with EPWP workers demanding permanent employment therefore leads towards a much larger conclusion. Workers cannot permanently secure the right to work, decent living standards and the services necessary for a dignified life while the wealth they collectively produce remains controlled by a minority whose economic power rests upon private ownership and profit.
The struggle for permanent work must therefore become part of the struggle to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. The demands of the EPWP workers begin in the workplace, but ultimately can be fully realised only on the political plane. The reorganisation of work in the interests of society as a whole is a political question. Programmes such as the EPWP, and the entire suite of similar programmes, are the outcome of policies consciously designed within a system that promotes the interests of those who own and control society’s wealth. It is into collision with these interests that the EPWP demands and campaign ultimately come.
To complement the struggle in the workplace, workers must therefore engage simultaneously in battle on the political plane. This requires the working class to organise politically and create a party that champions its interests — a workers’ party on a socialist programme.
The EPWP victory has demonstrated that workers whom the system treated as temporary and disposable can organise themselves, sustain a struggle and force concessions. Its most important legacy will be realised when those lessons pass into the hands of the millions of precarious, unemployed and permanently employed workers whose collective strength has yet to be mobilised.
Permanent work — permanent employment. Jobs and services for all.
Organise the unorganised. Unite the working class. Fight for socialism.