After a week since the Greater Eldorado Park Civic, the Kapok Residents Association and the Gauteng EPWP Forum wrote to the Saftu NEC and the Working Class Summit Steering Committee, there has been no response; not even an acknowledgment of receipt. This is despite the Extended Steering Committee of 17 March, at our request discussing the matter and agreeing to propose a meeting between the Saftu and Amcu/Labour Party leadership.
We therefore feel obliged to publish this as an Open Letter to the rank-and-file of Saftu affiliates and to the working class generally. With the elections due to take place on May 29, it is a matter of the utmost urgency not just for SAFTU,WCS, AMCU and the Labour Party but for the working class as a whole for the struggles beyond the elections.
The Secretary General
South African Federation of Trade Unions
FAO: National Executive Committee, the Political and Ideological Commission and the Working Class Summit Steering Committee.
10th April, 2024
The 2024 Elections and Association of Construction and Mining Union’s Labour Party
Dear Comrade Zwelinzima Vavi,
On 16th March, 2024, Saftu called a meeting of the Working Class Summit Extended Steering Committee for the 17th March, 2024. We described the omission of a discussion of the most significant elections since 1994 as well as the Association of Mining and Construction Union’s establishment of a Labour Party, as a disgraceful dereliction of duty towards the working class.
The Greater Eldorado Park United Civic, Kapok Residents Association and the Gauteng EPWP Forum, present at the meeting, proposed that the Working Class Summit give the LP critical support in the elections. It was agreed that the matter be referred to the Saftu NEC.
The WhatsApp exchanges on 19th March, 2024, with the Saftu Acting President, comrade Maredi, have clarified nothing. In truth the Saftu leadership has recoiled from its founding congress resolution to form a workers party. This is why they have no position on the 2024 elections. We are deeply disappointed with the Saftu leadership’s abject capitulation in the face of the much more blatant mobilsation by the class enemy in these elections as they prepare to step up the offensive against working people.
2024 elections campaign reflect class polarisation and conflict to come
Of the social forces that will be lining up against each other across the class barricades, only the capitalist has readied its forces in preparation for the intensified conflict to follow,
On the one side, big business is making an unprecedented attempt to influence the outcome of the elections – the composition and policies of the post-election government. Bourgeois strategists and the ANC leadership have formed a virtual united front. They plan to continue the neo-liberal offensive, begun with Gear in 1996 and escalated after 2008 Global Financial Crisis.
Big business has spent a declared half a billion rand on pro-neo-liberal capitalist formations – much more is undeclared. Their role will be either to prop up the ANC inside a capitalist coalition, or, like the DA, exert right wing pressure on it from outside – the opposition benches.
Between the barricades separating the two main classes, are petty bourgeois reactionary formations actively promoting working class divisions using race, ethnicity, nationality and religious bigotry and attacks on women and LGBTQI rights. The MK Party now also supports the most xenophobic- ActionSA and Patriotic Alliance – in spreading this anti-working class toxin.
The only party to emerge from the organised working class is the LP Amcu has launched. Even then its attempt to contest has been thwarted by new IEC regulations that amount to an attack on democratic rights and tilting the right to contest in favour of the rich. Not even on this democratic question has Saftu said anything nor offered support for the LP’s legal challenge.
Conditions for a workers party are very favorable
We applaud the approach that Amcu has taken regarding the Labour Party. Inviting the progressive movements and trade unions, is similar to the position taken by SAFTU originally at its founding congress. We appeal for this to be followed through to its logical and politically necessary conclusion.
- Saftu reached out to the wider working class as part of the implementation of the resolution to establish a workers party. Saftu’s founding congress established its Political and Ideological Commission which recommended Saftu convene a working class summit (WCS) in July 2018. The WCS adopted a declaration to establish a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
- The WCS was attended by 147 formations. In subsequent Extended WCS Steering Committee meetings the numbers more than doubled.
- Amcu, following the adoption of its resolution at a special congress in July 2023, similarly invited progressive movements and trade unions on 18th December, 2023 and again on 6th March, 2024.
- We thus have on the one hand, a trade union federation, Saftu, with a membership of over 700 000, that has reaffirmed its 2017 founding congress resolution to form a workers party at its second congress in 2022.
- On the other hand we have the unaffiliated 250 000-strong Amcu adopting the same position at a special congress in 2023. Combined, Saftu and Amcu have a potential membership of nearly a million if they brought their forces together to jointly build a workers party. There is not a single party contesting the 2024 elections that can claim such a mandate or potential membership base.
- Saftu and the WCS Steering Committee should immediately have reached out to Amcu and the LP to join forces.
A party to unite the working class is lodged not just in the objective situation. It is the direction in which working class consciousness has been travelling since the abandonment of the social democratic Freedom Charter and the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the imposition of Gear in 1996. Cosatu’s own report of a survey of member political attitudes confirmed this. Outsourced to Moeletsi Mbeki in 2010, but released after a delay only in 2013, it found that 67% of Cosatu members (up from 30% in 1998) were in favour of a workers party to challenge the ANC. The report was completed before the Marikana massacre.
These intra-Tripartite Alliance class contradictions have become reinflamed. At Cosatu’s September, 2022 congress, triggered by the 2020 public sector wage theft, unions representing 600 000 of its 1.6m members tabled a resolution calling for Cosatu to break with the ANC. The even more ferocious attacks planned on public sector workers could collapse the Alliance.
All these developments show that organised workers are gravitating towards each other politically from different directions in Amcu, Numsa and Saftu, driven by the urge for working class unity. The Amcu and Saftu leaderships are emissaries for working class political unity.
The Saftu leadership should not need reminding that both developments – indeed the birth of Saftu itself – have their origins in the heroic strike wave of the mineworkers in 2012. We owe it to the martyrs of Marikana that the workers party has been placed on the organised workers movement’s agenda today. They sacrificed their lives, in the final analysis, to free organised workers from the political prison of the Tripartite Alliance led by the capitalist ANC.
Working Class Under Attack
The Saftu leadership appears to be paralysed in the face of the systematic rolling back of working class gains. The right to strike has been crippled through compulsory secret balloting and picketing rules actively encouraging scabbing.
Far more seriously, in the 2018-2020 public sector wage dispute the labour movement has been subjected to the most serious attack in the democratic era. The Concourt has given constitutional legitimacy to government’s 2020 wage theft. Confirming that it is the judicial wing of our class enemy, the Concourt delivered the most stridently anti-working class judgement since the end of apartheid. The Concourt has effectively declared that it is within the government’s constitutional power to take away the right to public sector collective bargaining. The logic of this position is that a strike against this judgement would itself be unconstitutional. Its effect is thus to attack the right to strike itself – a fundamental conquest of the struggle.
The below inflation 4.7% increase for public sector workers that government has announced is not an “offer.” It is the imposition of a cut in real terms. That is how matters now stand. Public sector wages are no longer negotiated; they are decided by a government bending the knee to the capitalist class. Finance Minister Godongwana’s commitment to a primary budget surplus can only be achieved by even more savage social spending cuts. Central to this neo-liberal fiscal strategy is the public sector wage bill which the capitalists have been screaming to be cut with increasing hysteria.
Encouraged by the capitalists class’ puppet ANC government, the Concourt’s class aggression and the weakness of the trade unions, the DA has gone further. It has tabled a Private Members Bill to provide for wage freezes or cuts linked to the “progress” in the payment of the national debt. In this total onslaught on the working class, treasury’s primary budget surplus plans complement the DA’s bill. The Reserve Bank has declared that interest rates will stay- “higher for longer” – the refrain of central banks worldwide. The private sector bosses are conducting a war of attrition on collective bargaining through constant attempts to limit the extension of collective agreements to non-parties.
Working people face an onslaught on all fronts: rampant corruption; Eskom and Transnet’s privatisation, the soaring cost of living, horrifying rates of gender-based violence, rising crime, and environmental destruction.
A workers party has never been more necessary and urgent
Bourgeois parliamentary elections may be the lowest form of class struggle; but they are a form of class struggle nonetheless. The capitalists class, its government and institutions are mobilising. As their system convulses in a death agony, an even greater share of the burden of the now 16-year long neo-liberal offensive against the working class must be shouldered by working people.
The possibility of the organised working class reclaiming its political, ideological and class independence has never been greater. It has also never been more urgent. This is no time to indulge in the political equivalent of a “quest for zero defect” in each other’s political and ideological positions. As midwives of the workers party the Amcu and Saftu leaderships should not be examining each other’s eyes looking for splinters when both have beams in theirs.
Whether the Amcu leadership is true to its word that the LP should not be regarded as the union’s party, can only be tested out in practice. Not to accept its invitation to all progressive formations and trade unions to join forces would be sheer sectarianism. Until proven otherwise, the Amcu/LP leadership must be given the benefit of the doubt. Any differences can be hammered out in the joint struggles the government and the bosses’ impending attacks demand.
SAFTU should be supporting the Labour Party’s legal challenge for the right to contest. Regardless of the outcome we call upon the Saftu leadership to urgently convene a joint meeting of the PIC, the Steering Committee and the NEC to agree to meet with the Amcu/LP leadership. This should be followed by joint provincial mass meetings to build up to a national working class convention to launch a mass workers party.
Comradely
Weizmann Hamilton
On behalf of GEPUC, KARA and the Gauteng EPWP Forum