WATCH: SA must address the class question - Jim

Cape Town - Fin24 columnist Terry Bell interviews the National Union of Metalworkers SA (Numsa) general secretary Irvin Jim about the union's 10th National Congress in Cape Town.

The trade union split from Cosatu two years ago after being expelled from the trade union federation.

"Without addressing the class question, there is no dignity that will be restored," according to Jim.

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.

“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.

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