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Cape Town – Twenty-one years into democracy whites still make up 75% of all top management positions in the South African economy and they continue to promote one another, says the National Union of Metalworkers SA (Numsa).
The trade union, which split from Cosatu two years ago after being expelled from the trade union federation, is holding its 10th National Congress in Cape Town.
In its Secretariat Report for 2016, Numsa said “Colonialism of a Special Type” continues to exist in the country. “The stranglehold of a small number of white monopoly capitalists over the great bulk of SA’s wealth and resources is based on colonial dispossession and promotes racial oppression,” it said.
Giant, militant union to rival Cosatu
In the document, Numsa said the “ruthless constitutional defence of white monopoly capital” and the inherited English and apartheid white social and cultural privilege have ensured that the monopoly of social and cultural resources remains exclusively white, with a “slow gradual sprinkling of Black and African people”.
“We the working class,” Numsa says, “have no illusions about the post-1994 South Africa. It is a racist capitalist country with the world’s most extreme levels of inequality.”
Numsa in its report calls for a “giant, militant, worker-controlled national trade union federation of the working class”. This will be a direct competition with trade union federation Cosatu.
“We have no illusions that giving birth to a socialist revolutionary political party of the working class will be easy and a one-day affair,” Numsa says.
