Migrants not responsible for unemployment - Vavi

Johannesburg - Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said on Friday that migrant workers from Africa who seek employment in South Africa should not be blamed for the country's unemployment and poverty.

"We have to fight relentlessly against attempts to shift the blame for poverty and unemployment on our fellow African workers and make them scapegoats," Vavi said in a speech prepared for delivery at the World Social Forum on Migration in Johannesburg.

"We must link the dangers of racism and xenophobia to the underlying social crisis and turn people's anger against their real enemy - the capitalist system of production, distribution and exchange."

Undercurrent of anger

Vavi blamed the end of the apartheid system for the manner in which non-South African workers were being treated.

"Since 1994, there is also worrying evidence of an undercurrent of anger being misdirected to non-SA workers and foreign-owned small businesses.

"At a time when the country has experienced massive unemployment, there has been a high influx of immigrants, either legal or undocumented, causing some people to put the blame for their predicament on foreigners, particularly those from other African countries."

He described migrant workers as being "so desperate that they are prepared to move to wherever they can reach to earn some money, which in turn made workers in the countries they moved into feel that their own jobs were under threat.

Development plan

"The immigrant workers then become scapegoats for frustrations arising from persisting socio-economic ills and the lack of an understanding of the root causes of the crisis facing people from other countries, which can then dangerously take the form of seeing 'them' and 'us'."

Vavi called for migration and socio-economic policies that would identify the problems associated with xenophobia and racist conditions that migrant workers faced and would find ways to address them.

As part of interventions to curb migration problems, Vavi also urged the African Union to intervene.

"International migration policy in Africa must be part of a broader, comprehensive development plan for the continent, to reverse the persisting problems of underdevelopment and growing inequalities and human rights violations that deepen poverty and social crisis.

He also called on African trade unions to defend "continent-wide minimum standards of workers' rights to form and join unions, have the same labour protection under the law and the same minimum wages and conditions, regardless of national origin".