ANNIVERSARY | One Year Since EPWP and CHW Union Buildings Slave Revolt

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”. Attended by 2,000 workers, there were marches through the Pretoria CBD on both days, and on the night of the twelfth, workers occupied the lawns in front of the Union Buildings.The workers’ demands were for permanent jobs and a living wage after spending years on ANC slave-labour programmes that refused to recognise them as workers. The action was a joint programme organised by the MWP, the Gauteng EPWP Workers Forum and the Nupsaw trade union.

In 2020 Ramaphosa’s Sona ignored the thousands of angry workers occupying his front lawn, even as he stood up to make the usual empty promises about job creation on behalf of the ANC government. He made the same empty promises this year. The ANC government are ‘champions’ of talking about job creation. However, when they are faced with real workers, demanding that their existing jobs be saved, they are blind, deaf and dumb.

The action at Union Buildings last February was, we believe, the most significant workers’ movement event of 2020.

CHWs

The EPWP workers had been employed by the Gauteng Department of Infrastructure Development (DID) for up to six years. They had been denied the minimum wage and the minimal protection of labour legislation. At the time of the Union Buildings action, the EPWP workers faced dismissal in six weeks’ time. The Gauteng EPWP Workers Forum was self-organised by the workers themselves to fight this, with MWP member Executive Mukwevho as Provincial Co-ordinator.

Nupsaw had already taken the initiative to organise Community Health Workers, who occupied a position just above the EPWP ‘field slaves’ – ‘house slaves’ with slightly more pay. Unions like Nehawu, affiliated to the ANC aligned Cosatu, refused to organise these workers, effectively aiding the government’s strategy of undermining permanent jobs in the public sector particularly through programmes EPWP and its spin-offs in Early Childhood Development etc.

Over years of campaigning CHWs had won a significant victory – recognition as permanent workers – by skilfully combining mass action and legal challenges. But government had to be threatened with further mass action for resisting implementation of a Labour Court judgement recognising Gauteng CHWs as permanent workers before moving the workers from Ramaphosa’s slave-wage minimum of R3,500 and not onto the government payroll to enjoy salaries more than twice that level together with benefits.

This victory inspired EPWP workers. Similar improvements could be won for them too. The willingness of the Nupsaw leadership to unite their CHW campaign with the Forum’s EPWP campaign showed the Nupsaw leadership’s commitment to workers unity in practise, not just as a slogan. The union welcomed the EPWP workers as members.

Campaign

The action at Union Buildings marked the beginning of a sustained campaign. On 9 March, having received no response to the memorandum handed-over at Union Buildings, EPWP workers protested at the DID’s Johannesburg offices. This included occupying the offices overnight. Unable to ignore this, and visibly shaken by the workers’ boldness, management agreed to talks. Thus began a long and drawn-out ‘cat and mouse’ game between the ANC’s managers and the workers, which continues even to today.

The dishonesty and duplicity of the ANC’s ‘bad faith’ approach to negotiations was on display from the very first minute they sat down with workers. On the night of 9 March, after agreeing to talks the next day, the management pressured the police to forcibly remove the workers. But the police refused, themselves disgusted by the shamelessness of the ANC officials. Then, after the protest ended the next day, with an agreement for future negotiations to begin, the MWP, Nupsaw, Saftu and the Gauteng EPWP Workers Forum were served with a Labour Court summons as the DID sought to interdict the protest.

This was thrown out by the judge who lambasted the DID for approaching the Labour Court, which adjudicates disputes between employers and employees, when they refused to recognise EPWP workers as employees, instead describing them as “beneficiaries”, “volunteers” or “participants” – a cynical strategy to deny them their rights.

Pandemic

The mass dismissal of 3,000+ EPWP workers, was carried-out by the ANC-run DID on schedule. They cruelly used the Covid-19 pandemic, State of Disaster and hard lockdown to call-off the negotiations they had agreed to, and, with the army on the streets enforcing the lockdown, were insulated from the mass protests that they would otherwise have faced.

However, it did not have to be this way. At the same time, the ANC-run Gauteng Government refused to extend the absolutely historic victory Nupsaw had extracted from the Department of Health to give permanent jobs to all of Gauteng’s CHWs to other provinces. It was a political choice of the DID, and the Gauteng Government responsible for it, to withhold a similar deal from the EPWP workers.

Thus began a bleak and hungry few months for EPWP workers. Their stipends were ended and many were unable to access the emergency R350 Social Relief of Distress grant. On application their statuses still showed as “employed. As a demonstration of their callous indifference over the plight into which they had plunged the EPWP workers, ANC councillors, seeing the EPWP workers as hostile to the ANC government, not only manipulated the SRD grant application process, but hijacked food parcels. All of this happened whilst Ramaphosa was making speeches promising that no worker would lose their jobs during the lockdown – as usual, hypocrisy dripped from every one of his words.

As the lockdown eased, workers returned to the streets in June, protesting outside the Gauteng Legislature, demanding they keep promises to intervene made over years of negotiations. With ongoing restrictions on movement and gatherings due to the pandemic, not to mention the desperate poverty workers now faced, a ‘guerrilla’ strategy of regular pickets and protests outside their former workplaces has been fought on and off, as well as sending delegations to participate in other protests to keep the flame alive. In October, EPWP workers mass-mobilised again to participate in a Nupsaw day of action at the PIC and Department of Public Service and Administration in Pretoria.

Significance

The MWP salutes both Nupsaw and the CHWs and the determination and perseverance of the EPWP workers to continue their struggle in the face of enormous hardships. Treated little better than slaves when on the EPWP programme, the EPWP workers are now treated like ‘outside dogs’, with every ANC ministry, provincial department and office, repeatedly slamming the door in their faces. Adding insult to injury, whilst refusing to re-employ the EPWP workers, the ANC-run Gauteng Government, its crony cadres and tenderpreneurs have used the pandemic for an orgy of self-enrichment and corruption. The PPE and school cleaning fiascos are just those acts of grand-corruption that have become public.

With this struggle as their model, Saftu could have set the tone for the Cosatu ‘general strike’ of 7 October (see here), to mobilise beyond the existing layers of activists, and inspire the hundreds of thousands that have been denied a decent income and benefits through the capitalist ANC government’s war on permanent jobs, which began in earnest in 2003 with the introduction of the EPWP programme. Likewise, adopting this model as a way to bring fresh layers into the struggle ahead of Saftu’s planned 24 February strike, a date that has been on the calendar for several months, would have gone a long way to ensuring its success.

The EPWP workers should be proud of the historic role they played and the example that they have set for the workers and trade union movement. With virtually no resources, they gave the trade union movement an important lesson in what the slogan “organise the unorganised” should like in practise.