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Cape Town - A properly functioning postal system - like the Press and the police services - is a key pillar of any mature and civilised democracy. This is a comment to last week’s Inside Labour column by reader Mark Crozier and highlighted by Terry Bell.
Another reader, Jurgen Hartman, agreed with this view, but then blamed the unions for the problem. This, says Bell, is a mistake, since the unions have consistently pointed out the problems within the system and called for change.
Reader Roger Pacey, he feels, correctly summed up the problem when he noted that “bad management is bad management”; that it mattered not whether it was worker control or cadre deployee control. However, Bell adds, he should have added “or private sector control”; that bad management of any kind is bad.
But such matters, including the threat to up to 10 000 jobs at Telkom and ongoing volatility in the mining sector were eclipsed, Bell maintains, by the events surrounding the State of the Nation Address. This, he says, was understandable, given that constitutional issues were directly involved.
Questions of who exactly ordered the jamming of digital communications in parliament and detail about the nature and training of the plain clothed security detachment that bundled out the Economic Freedom Fighters MPs will doubtless continue, he says.
However, job losses at Telkom and the situation in the mining industry - the “minerals backbone of the country”- should remain a labour focus, especially with the latest wage round about to begin and with tensions over union memberships again being highlighted.
- Follow Terry on twitter @telbelsa.
