SACP message of solidarity with Cosatu and all workers on World Decent Work Day
7 October 2016, Durban
Today our ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) is observing the World Day for Decent Work and has called a protected national strike. The SACP would like to take this opportunity to express its message of revolutionary solidarity with, and support to Cosatu and the workers of South Africa and the world in the struggle to achieve decent work.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has positioned itself as the pioneer of decent work. It has produced a manual of, listing ten, decent work indicators. It provides details under each one of the indicators, namely, employment opportunities; adequate earnings and productive work; decent working time; combining work, family and personal life; work that should be abolished; stability and security of work; equal opportunity and treatment in employment; safe work environment; social security; and social dialogue, employers` and workers` representation.
All of these are all very important basic conditions of employment, by the way, rather than decent work proper.
Let us briefly underline the fundamental condition of decent work proper. There is one important indicator missing from the ILO`s conception of decent work thus making it narrow. This is by no means an accident. The ILO`s institutionalised framework of thought about fundamental workers` rights is limited to the parameters of capitalist social relations of production.
The ILO is therefore only concerned with setting minimum standards and their realisation under the prevalence of the regime of capitalist exploitation of workers` labour. The ILO does not stand for a paradigm shift. It stands for capitalist paradigm maintenance. The ILO is therefore a bourgeoisie society institution not concerned about the cornerstone of decent work - i.e., it is not concerned about the realisation of the very fundamental need to eliminate the exploitation of labour by capital and thus ensure decent work proper. The realisation of this fundamental decent work indicator is excluded from the ILO`s "decent work indicators". It will not happen under the ILO in terms of its current architecture and agenda.
The SACP is therefore calling on workers to intensify the struggle for the elimination of economic exploitation so that everyday can become a real decent work day. Cosatu and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as class conscious workers` organisations respectively have the full support of the SACP in this struggle. This is our shared struggle!
The SACP also pledges its support to Cosatu`s other social wage demands that the federation is advancing today on this national day of action for decent work. The demands include a comprehensive social security programme, implementation of a national minimum wage, banning of labour brokers, implementation of the National Health Insurance (NHI) and the acceleration of our African National Congress led government`s ongoing rollout of free education for the poor, the unemployed, the working class and lower sections of the middle class who cannot afford to pay school and student fees at public colleges and universities.
All of these and other demands must be buttressed by a vigorous effort to move our ongoing national democratic revolution on to a second radical phase. In particular, radical economic transformation is fundamental in the struggle for the realisation of the strategic objectives of the second radical phase of our democratic transition. This includes taxing the rich and the wealthy to finance social redistributive programmes such as the acceleration of the rollout of free education for classes and strata that cannot afford to pay.
Without advancing and deepening radical economic transformation, it will be difficult or impossible to expand on the many important social redistributive programmes that our country has achieved since our April 1994 democratic breakthrough. It will be difficult to sustain social transformation as a whole. We cannot afford to sink the national democratic revolution into indebtedness and then deliver it right into the jaws of finance capital, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank included.
Many revolutions that went the route of the dictatorship of finance capital, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, have either been aborted or postponed for a long time to come. It was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that - concerned only with the exploitation of labour and private accumulation of public assets and wealth as well as loan plus interest rates repayments - imposed privatisation, outsourcing or out-contracting. We must defend our democratic transition from this and all other forms of corporate capture, including corruption and rent-seeking.
Issued by the SACP