16 August 2019
The South African Communist Party (SACP) calls on workers and trade unions to unite with each other and together wage the common struggle against economic exploitation by capitalist bosses. This is the thrust of our message as the SACP on this occasion, the commemoration of the seventh anniversary of the Rustenburg platinum belt and the Marikana tragedy.
The SACP sends its message of sincere solidarity to the families of the workers who were killed before, during and after that tragic day, 16 August 2012, to workers who were victimised, attacked and displaced, and to all the women workers who were sexually abused and raped. All the ugly events of that tragic year and those that occurred thereafter both in the Rustenburg platinum belt and other areas in the mining industry, without exception, must never be repeated in this country.
The situation had some of its immediate causes in the fact that capitalist platinum mining bosses reneged on collective bargaining agreements at the individual company level. Implats for example unilaterally undermined a collective agreement by offering discriminatory wage increases to one section of workers at the exclusion of the other categories and thereby caused the serious problem that erupted. This is exactly what happened in regard to the violence that the action engendered, and which snowballed to other mining establishments.
In the face of the global capitalist economic crisis that broke out in 2007/8 and consequently falling platinum prices the capitalist bosses sought to force loses upon workers. They pursued a wide range of restructuring measures in defence and pursuit of profitability and profit maximisation. The measures included deepening outsourcing and increased retrenchments, and in worsening employment, job and income insecurity, adversely affecting workers. The underpinning scandal, perpetuated to this day by the capitalist bosses, was and remains the enormous inequality and remuneration disparities between the workers at the coalface and top executives who work in air conditioned offices far away from the gruelling mining labour process and exposure to health and safety hazards.
What happened in the Rustenburg platinum belt inclusive of Marikana points to the fundamental necessity for workers and trade unions to unite in pursuit of the common struggle against economic exploitation; the struggle for social emancipation.
The SACP calls on the criminal justice system to ensure that all the perpetrators are brought to book. It must not be possible in a democratic South Africa to have people killed and no one held to account.
The SACP further calls on the recommendations of the Farlam Commission to be fully implemented. The delayed compensation should be paid out as soon as possible. The beneficiaries must include the families of the ten workers who were killed before 16 August 2012, all workers who were killed on that tragic day, and all others whose loved ones were killed thereafter.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP
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