Category Archives: unemployment

From Marikana to ‘Maritzburg: Our Country is Disgracing Itself

2 January 2012
Unemployed Peoples’ Movement Press Statement

From Marikana to ‘Maritzburg: Our Country is Disgracing Itself

During the Christmas break we received the most shocking news from KwaZulu-Natal. The provincial traffic department in that province advertised 90 positions for trainee traffic officers. More than 150 000 people applied. Most of them were aged between the ages of 18 and 20. On Christmas Day 34 000 people received text messages saying that they had been short listed for these jobs. They were divided into two groups and asked to report to the Harry Gwala Stadium on the 27th and 28th of December. They were not told what to expect on arrival. When the thousands of hopeful and excited young people arrived at the stadium they were told that they had to perform a fitness test – running four kilometers. They weather was very hot and no water or medical care was provided. Many of these young people had already traveled long distances to reach the stadium. Many of them were not properly dressed for a 4 kilometer run in the heat. On the first day hundreds of people collapsed and six died. A seventh person committed suicide. On the second day the so-called fitness test was repeated. By Sunday 230 people were in hospital.

This is not an isolated case. There have been many cases where thousands of young people have turned up for a handful of jobs. There was the case of the National Youth Development Agency in East London. There was the case of Transnet in Bloemfontein.

The politicians are calling the loss of seven young people in Pietermaritzburg a tragedy. They also called the massacre at Marikana a tragedy and the murder of Andries Tatane a tragedy. This is not a tragedy. It is a disgrace. It is an outrage.

It is a disgrace that so many young people have no jobs or income or access to education. It is an outrage that people who are desperate for jobs are treated in such an inhuman manner. If the apartheid government had done this it would have been an international scandal. There would have been protests around the world. It is very clear to us that we are held in contempt by the politicians that say that they are representing us and carrying out the second transition in the national democratic revolution on our behalf. We are not human beings to them. We are just ladders to them. They are predators becoming rich and powerful in the name of our suffering and struggle. They are the real counter-revolutionaries.

The lives of people who are poor and black count for nothing in this country. They count for nothing to the capitalists, to the politicians and even to some of the media. It is our duty to insist that the lives of all people must count. People must be held accountable for the outrage in Pietermaritzburg. We fully support the call for the resignation of the MEC for Transport in the province, Willies Mchunu. He was discredited in 2009 for his role in supporting the armed attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo by ANC supporters. We reject the statement by the South African Communist Party in support of Mchunu with all the contempt that it deserves. The SACP are nothing but apologists for oppression.

Frantz Fanon wrote that: “A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.” Our society is not viable. It must be replaced.

Our mission for the new year is to keep working to unite all the struggles – in the shacks, on the mines and on the farms – into a revolutionary mass movement of the working class and the poor that can change this society from below. We are also determined to ensure that this is the year in which the NGOs learn to respect the autonomy of our movements and to understand that their role is to support the struggles of the working class and the poor and not to lead our struggles on our behalf. We will not be bussed into NGO meetings over which we have no control and where we are treated with no respect. Solidarity is not the same thing as manipulation and domination.

Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462
Asanda Ncwadi 071 010 5441

SACSIS: ‘Dropped Against the Rocks of Promise’

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1330

‘Dropped Against the Rocks of Promise’

by Richard Pithouse

More than half of our young people are unemployed. For many of these people there is no formal route through which they can develop their energies and creativity and have them rewarded with a passage into autonomy and adulthood. Time becomes circular rather than linear and as life moves in descending and tightening spirals rather than up and forward. Pain and panic set into the bones.

Some people are able to keep their spirits up with the support of family, friends and congregations that sustain warmth and community amidst desolation. Others succumb to depression, cynicism, various ways of numbing pain or the temptation to blame other vulnerable people for their inability to bring their lives to bloom.

The deep roots of this disaster lie in the long night of colonial and apartheid dispossession. This is one of the reasons why we can’t pretend to be a normal country until the question of justice has been properly attended to. But we cannot allow this reality, urgent as it is, to be misused to allow the ANC to deny its own complicity with the ongoing waste of human life.

The ANC’s policy choices have often actively reinscribed the systemic exclusion of millions of young people from social opportunity. The failure, the gross failure, to adequately reform education; the ongoing resegregation of our cities on the basis of class and in the name of ‘development’ and ‘delivery’; and the failure to develop rural and urban economies that can meet people’s needs cannot be reduced to ‘the legacy of the past’.

And, the authoritarian and predatory nature of some of factions in the political class cannot be denied. The limits to the messianic self-belief that has often led the ANC and many of its supporters to assume that the mere fact that it holds state power automatically changes the nature and consequence of that power are equally evident.

For some time, the ANC was able to contain people left out of the new order with a mixture of welfare and the collective optimism generated by the end of apartheid. But as it slowly became clear that time is not, as it had first seemed in the warm glow of liberation, on the side of the poor, containment has increasingly included clientelism and repression, both often organised through local party structures. There are now parts of the country where for many poor people accessing basic services, or some forms of work, requires a party card and where the police, or party members, openly repress dissent. And while Jacob Zuma’s ascent to the Presidency was heralded by some as a victory for the left it was, from the moment of the Polokwane Resolutions, openly accompanied by a turn towards a policy agenda aimed more at the spatial containment and political control of the poor than at inclusion and political empowerment. Zuma’s Presidency has been marked by a decisive shift towards a more authoritarian state complete with a militarised police force; phone taps, torture and mob violence in the shadows and a series of open attempts to formally reverse some of the democratic gains made in 1994.

But popular protest has continued to escalate and the ANC has continued to lose the support of intellectuals in the elite public sphere. The new weapon in the arsenal being prepared to sustain the ANC’s hegemony in the rocky days to come is an attempt to capture popular anger and direct it against enemies, real and imagined, outside of the party. In terms of the numbers on the streets it has, thus far, been a real failure. But in a society as deeply structured in elitism as ours, the idea of a ruling party using confrontational rhetoric to summon popular anger into the streets carries a real charge in the elite public sphere even when it is not backed up with real material force.

As our more thoughtful commentators have noted, the reality is that it is COSATU, and not the ANC, that has a real organisational machinery on the ground and a real capacity to mobilise. This is one reason why COSATU’s power within the alliance is rapidly increasing and why there is a real sense in which the ANC is now dependent on COSATU. But while the democratic currents in COSATU are certainly an important brake on the authoritarian nature of Zuma’s project, and while COSATU is an essential bulwark against the dangerous liberal consensus that we should be competing as a low wage economy, the growing power of COSATU does not mean that the people as a whole are gaining more effective routes into participation in government. COSATU, as has often been noted, increasingly represents middle class workers and does not represent most precarious workers or the unemployed. Its record of support for the diverse set of struggles that have been waged by the urban poor in recent years is, to say the least, slim. These facts are not trivial.

In the thinking of the modern left the systemic denial of the fullness of human life has often been primarily conceived in terms of work as a vampyric or crushing force. This is well captured in Oswald Mtshali’s 1971 poem The Song of Sunrise where it is work “that squeezes me like a lemon / of all the juice of my life.” Over time some measure has been taken of the ways in which work has been raced and gendered, and of unwaged work, from the plantation to the leaden longing in the kitchen. The anti-colonial struggles brought a concern with national oppression to the fore and also generated a concern amongst the radical intelligentsia for the agrarian question that continued into the postcolonial world. In some cases this became a romantic form of radicalism in that the ‘true’ nation was imagined to inhabit the villages.

And, especially since the end of the Second World War, and into the flowering of more open forms of radical thought in the 1960s, there has been a widening of the recognition of forms of dehumanisation that are not reducible to material exploitation. This enabled a fuller recognition of the political agency of students, gay people, migrants and others. But despite the opening in the 1960s it remains the case that the left has often viewed the urban poor, assumed to be cut adrift from the discipline of rural tradition and not subject to the discipline of modern industry, in terms that range from outright hostility to more moderate forms of suspicion and condescension.

In South Africa the material power and political quality of the political agency exercised by organised workers from the 1970s and, despite some dangerous alliances and compromises, into the current order is widely acknowledged. But its potency, often masculinised, should not blind us to other experiences and other modes of political agency. One of the reasons why this ethical necessity also takes on a strategic urgency is that today, a moment in which there are more workers in the mines and factories of the world than there have been at any point in history, the Communist Manifesto, with its sense of the relentless division of society into two contending class, both primarily articulated to the factory, increasingly makes a lot more sense in Surat or Shenzhen than in Detroit or Johannesburg.

In contemporary South Africa there are millions of young people whose oppression is characterised more by a lack of access to work than exploitation at work. For these people their suffering is less about being ‘squeezed like a lemon’ than, in a line from Head on Fire, Lesego Rampolokeng’s new collection of poems, “living a stray existence where the township cracks / frustrated hoisted then dropped against the rocks of promise.”

The old grammar of the left, centred on ideas like work, exploitation, unions and strikes is inadequate to take full measure of the forms of contemporary oppression gaining ground in our own country and in much of the world – including places like Greece, Spain and parts of the United States that had come to imagine themselves as holding a secure place in the zones of privilege.

Exclusion and redundancy are becoming as central to contemporary modes of oppression as the long history of dispossession and exploitation. Community struggles for access to land and cities; for services, education, housing and democratic decision making; and tactics like occupations, road blockades and vote strikes are central to the grammar of the new struggles, often less masculinised than the old, being forged by people who have been rendered surplus to capital rather than exploited by it.

Trade unions remain important and in South Africa, their importance could well be decisive. But the limits to their claims to representation are now classed as well as gendered. If we are to find a way through the crisis of the present, we will have to take the rebellion of the poor in all its diversity and in all its promise and peril, at least as seriously as trade unions. The old left dogma in which the organised working class stands in for the people as a whole, is a fiction from an age that is well lost.

UPM Statement on the Youth Wage Subsidy and the Clash between the DA and COSATU

Thursday, 17 May 2012
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

UPM Statement on the Youth Wage Subsidy and the Clash between the DA and COSATU

The Unemployed People’s Movement rejects the Youth Wage Subsidy as a solution to the unemployment crisis that is leaving millions of young people without a future. We note that there has been a concerted attempt by big business, their academic and media allies and the DA to present workers as lazy and overpaid. This is outrageous. Workers have struggled bravely for a living wage over many years and the gains that have been won must be defended. Today one worker is often responsible for many people and the reason why wages are higher in South Africa than in India or China is because people in South Africa could not survive on the wages paid in India or China. The cost of living is much higher here and most workers don’t have access to land to supplement the wage. Also most workers are forced to live in townships far from work and, due to the failure of the ANC to develop proper public transport, costs to get to and from work are very high. New housing developments are mostly even further from the cities than apartheid townships. We will always stand with the unions to defend the right of all workers to a living wage.

The youth wage subsidy is an attempt by big business to win subsidies from government that can be used to lower its wage bill. It will weaken the bargaining power of workers and lower wages will weaken the working class, and our economy, across the board. Big business built its wealth on the back of a history of racist oppression that included land dispossession and the migrant labour system. The government should not be subsidizing them now. The government should be subsidizing the poor directly!

After 1994 the ANC looked to capital to take the economy forward. The results of that were huge profits for business and a massive unemployment crisis affecting millions of lives. We became the most unequal country in the world and then the country with the highest rate of protest in the world. It is time to put people before profit.

It is clear to us that government is not willing to take responsibility for the poor. He is trying by all means to distance himself from us. Everywhere private companies are being given the responsibility for us but they are just interested in making money. They are the ones that retrench. They are the ones that have built RDP houses that are crumbling. Government must take heed of us. And government and not capital must direct the economy.

However we also note the deafening silence of COSATU on the unemployment crisis. The ANC represents the rich – its leaders are millionaires and billionaires – and COSATU represents the workers in the alliance. But no one represents the poor. As the unemployed we are not represented in the alliance. When we have tried to organize ourselves we have, like other poor people’s movements, been repressed by the ANC and no one can deny that COSATU and the SACP have been silent about this. Silence in the face of repression is complicity with repression.

We are willing to support COSATU against the ideological onslaught against workers and unions but they must also recognize that they don’t represent the poor and the unemployed and recognize and defend our right to organize ourselves. This is only fair. If they are not willing to recognize and defend our right to organize ourselves they cannot seriously claim to be a progressive force.

We condemn the thuggery with which COSATU responded to the DA march in the strongest terms. It is true that the DA is the party of capital. And COSATU had every right to organize a counter demonstration – we would support such a demonstration ourselves. But COSATU had no right to respond to the DA demonstration with violence. They could easily have won the battle of ideas. Truth and justice are on their side.

When we marched with the Democratic Left Front in Durban at COP 17 COSATU hi-jacked that march to make it pro-ANC while the ANC Youth League attacked us in the streets. If COSATU are given a free hand to attack the DA they will soon be attacking us in the streets too. At the end of the day all the organizations in the alliance try to protect the domination of the alliance. We call on all progressive forces to oppose the ANC’s descent into street thuggery. We all know what happened to Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban. We have to unite against all forms of authoritarianism and thuggery on the part of the ruling party. If we allow it to happen to the DA we will be next.

Our proposals for a proper solution to the unemployment crisis are as follows:

Long Term Strategies

* The education system must be fixed and made accessible to all.

* There must be radical land reform in favour of the people and not the predatory elites

* Corruption and plundering must be stopped

* Once corruption and plundering have been stopped we can nationalize the commanding heights of the economy and engage in a massive programme of public works.

* Taxes must be raised on big business to sponsor public works – but these must not be corrupted or only used to benefit members of the ruling party.

* The state needs to actively intervene to develop an economy that will meet the needs of the people

Short Term Strategies

* Government needs to immediately provide a universal and guaranteed income of at least R2 000 a month to all unemployed people. It is essential that this is a universal right otherwise it will, like all government jobs, only go to ANC members and this will undermine the movements of the poor.

* Good quality training must be made available to all unemployed people at no cost.

* All unemployed people must have free access to health care.

* The way forward is for the poor to continue to organize ourselves, to continue to protest and to continue to contest the battle of ideas in all forums from the streets to the newspapers. We will intensify our organizing efforts and our protests. We will continue to form stronger bonds with other movements, to refuse to be intimidated by repression and to resist attempts by NGOs to divide us and to direct us into the projects chosen by their funders. The unemployed and the poor need to build our own capacity to represent ourselves in society. If we cannot build our own power our future will be very bleak.

Contact:

Ayanda Kota 078 625
Julia Nazo 083 985 6333
Asanda Ncwadi 071 010 5441

UPM: Time for Radical Action on the Unemployment Crisis

13 May 2012
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Time for Radical Action on the Unemployment Crisis

The new statistics on unemployment are out. There are two very serious problems. The first is that the way that these statistics are compiled counts begging, hawking and all kinds of things that people do just to survive as ’employment’. This is nothing but sleight of hand. The second problem is that unemployment has been getting constantly worse since the end of apartheid.

Those of us who are old enough remember the posters in 1994 that said ‘Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!’. Those jobs never came. In fact millions of people lost their jobs. What has happened is that a predatory elite has seized control of the economy and made themselves hugely wealthy in the name of the nation. COSATU has struggled to protect the wages of the formally employed. But no one has stood up for the interests of the poor and people working informally.

Unemployment is a massive social crisis. It is the most serious crisis confronting our country. But every night we see the share prices on the news. We don’t see the unemployment statistics being discussed every night. Profit is more important than people.

We are told that the ‘macro-economic’ fundamentals are in place and some people even say that the ANC has done well with the economy. But what kind of economy is considered to be good when, even with the doctored statistics, it still admits that it leaves four million young people without a future?

We need an economy centred on people and not on profits. People and not profits must be the measure used to determine progress.

We need a society where corporate price-fixers and politicians and government officials that plunder the public purse are treated as criminals.

We need a society where the right to work is in the Constitution and where the state, if it fails to give each person a job, must give them a guaranteed income of at least R2 000 per month.

We support the occupation and self-management of work-places where ever this is possible. We also support the development of co-operatives from the ground up. But at the end of the day we can’t let the state off the hook. The predatory elite need to be dislodged from their perch and we need a state that puts the people first.

We call on all poor people’s movements and organisations to stand together, to reject co-option and manipulation by NGOs and to also ignore the fights within the ruling party and to build the struggle of the poor across the country. Our only hope is in our unity. We cannot prevail if we are not a well organised force.

Contact:

Ayanda Kota, UPM Spokesperson 078 625 6462
Asanda Ncwadi, UPM Chairperson 071 010 5441