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Johannesburg - Cosatu's critique of certain elements of the National Development Plan is not unjustified, ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has said.
"Cosatu... has a point when it speaks about setting a particular target for unemployment," she told Sapa in an interview this week.
"I think that the ANC's perspective is to eradicate poverty, and perhaps where there might be confusion about the elements of the plan is that IPAP2 [the Industrial Policy Action Plan], which is an action plan of the NDP, speaks very directly to the stimulation of our industrial base."
She said the ANC was waiting for the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) and its affiliates to provide an overall critique of the NDP.
The NDP was adopted at the ANC's Mangaung conference in December.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) and Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi have publicly criticised the plan.
Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim previously said the union saw the NDP as a departure from the ANC's Freedom Charter and as no different from Democratic Alliance policies. He said capitalists were "very happy" with it.
Last month, Vavi said Cosatu would continue to differ with its alliance partner, the ANC, about the NDP proposals.
"It is simply unfair for anyone, in particular our ally... to ask us to co-operate with our own oppression and exploitation, which is what the NDP's major proposals are," he said.
"The NDP represents a typical example of the chicken and a pig partnership, in which the chicken offers to lay eggs for breakfast, but asks the pig to donate bacon. This will become the last straw in every respect."
Vavi said the NDP was an "anti-worker" policy and its economic and labour market proposals constituted a serious assault on workers.
Duarte said Numsa's critique was "appreciated", because it had taken the time to develop and discuss positions on the NDP.
"[However], I think let's wait for the entire federation to come together and they have settled on what it is they want to say to the ANC about the NDP," she said.
"We [the ANC] think the plan is a good plan. We didn't adopt it because we were trying to appease the government."
She said ANC agreed with Numsa that it should not forgo any of the rights it had been able to achieve for working people.
Duarte said the NDP was important in achieving economic gains for the country, since this was not part of the country's transition to democracy.
"At Codesa [the Convention for a Democratic SA], there was no discussion about the economy. We discussed the liberation of people and human rights, but we did not emerge from Codesa with a discussion on the economy," she said.
The economy, by and large, had been left the way it always had been and that had to change.
"We need to break the glass ceiling here, where it is not only about black people owning the means of production, it is also about people getting jobs."
