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Cape Town – Unions loyal to expelled Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi have slammed a "rigged" congress, said Cosatu was "dead" and announced plans to hold its own Workers Summit to rebuild the workers' movement.
The Special National Congress (SNC) held on 13 and 14 July 2015 “was rigged by the federation’s leadership in order to crush workers’ right to express their views and to force through decisions,” the group’s spokesperson, Patrick Craven, said in an email on Thursday.
The former spokesperson of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said the “federation is now dead, murdered by a leadership which has reduced it into a paralysed, disunited and feeble shadow of its former self”.
“The SNC was manipulated to ensure that any attempts to discuss the crisis facing Cosatu and to reverse the expulsion of its biggest affiliate Numsa and … Vavi were prevented,” he said.
This comes after the Communications Workers Union (CWU) on Wednesday announced that it had pulled out of the group of affiliates calling itself the "nine plus unions" loyal to Vavi on the basis that it does not want to be "entrenching division".
READ: CWU pulls out of 'nine plus unions'
White monopolies will now get richer
Craven said it is now clear that the SNC debacle was “engineered not only by the federation’s current leaders, but by the state, and its political representatives in the ANC and specifically the SACP, in order to turn it into an obedient appendage of the state”.
“It has been a capitalist class offensive aimed at dividing and weakening the organised working class,” he said. “While the current Cosatu leaders have been pawns in a much bigger conspiracy, though as willing accomplices they are no less guilty.”
“Its aim is in line with the neo-liberal free-market policies encapsulated in the National Development Plan, to enable white monopoly capital to get even richer by exploiting a weaker and more divided union movement so they can cut wages, outsource more jobs to labour brokers and thus increase their already massive profits.”
Workers Summit announced
Craven said the group would host a Workers Summit to “rebuild the movement that Cosatu once was, only much bigger and more effective, which will unite the workers of South Africa. No one will stop us because it has to be done for our class, and by our class.”
“We shall invite the broadest possible number of independent, representative workers’ federations and unions, including Cosatu and all its affiliated members.”
“We shall hold meetings at workplace and local meetings, followed by Provincial Summits leading to a national Workers Summit in September or October.”
“Workers are itching to fight back against the super-exploitation they are facing, the intolerable 36.1% level of unemployment, 54% of people suffering from poverty getting and 14 million of our people going to bed every night without food.”
“Meanwhile, we are mobilising for the mass marches against corruption on 19 August, when thousands of South Africans will be flooding the streets of Pretoria and other cities in protest against the epidemic of corruption, which is spreading like a plague in both the public and private sectors.”
