3 November 2004
The Congress of South African Trade Unions declares its full and enthusiastic support for the Red October Campaign of the South African Communist Party and is encouraging all its members and workers in general to join the nationwide marches in nine cities and towns on Saturday 6 November.
COSATU agrees wholeheartedly with the campaign's central theme - that there is a pressing need to speed up land reform. We have to make real the declaration of the Freedom Charter that the land belongs to the people. The workers, the landless and the poor must gain access, ownership and control to it.
We agree with the SACP, when it says: "Ten years into a democratic South Africa, we have seen massive resistance to land reform and protection of apartheid land ownership patterns and slave-labour conditions under which close to a million farm workers still toil. Therefore agricultural capital must answer the question: what is their contribution to democracy? What is their contribution to addressing the historical land grievance? How can they justify the reality that more than 80% of productive land is still in the hands of some 46,000 white corporations and individual farmers? How can they justify the reality that less than 3% of this land has been redistributed to the landless over the last ten years? What have they done about this, and what are they going to do to correct this huge historic, social, political and economic injustice? The National Land Summit is an important opportunity for this discussion to take place and for a historic breakthrough on the land question to be achieved."
This is a struggle for the transformation of the lives of the rural poor. We have to free farm workers from the poverty, insecurity and even violence that is still the everyday reality for thousands of them. We support the SACP demands for:
Security of tenure for farm workers,
The enforcement of the minimum wage,
Freedom of all workers to join and be active in trade unions
The end to all forms of violence and abuse by employers
The provision of basic services - social security, education, health care, etc - in rural communities
Scrapping child labour
Ending the 'tot' system of payment
Access to credit so that workers and poor farmers can establish their own farms
Access to adequately funded legal Justice Centres
Government action to enforce all statutory rights
A national land summit in 2005.
COSATU wishes the SACP well in its campaign and pledge to everything possible to mobilise support and achieve their aims.
Patrick Craven Acting COSATU Spokesperson
patrick@cosatu.org.za , 082-821-7456, 339-4911