Cosatu’s first 20 years have been an extraordinary time. And from its founding in the bleak and violent 1980s, to its current, sometimes conflicted position in our immature democracy, it has remained a crucial humanising force.
In contrast with many labour movements elsewhere in the world, it remains fiercely independent of both capital and the state. Movements for worker rights and economic justice like the Congress of Non-European Trade Unions, the South Africa Congress of Trade Unions and the Federation of South African Trade Unions have been crucial in getting us to where we are today.
And Cosatu has continued, when it would be all too easy to settle into complacency, to force privileged South Africans to confront the sea of socio-economic distress that surrounds them. One may not always agree with its economic prescriptions, but it has consistently spoken up for those who have yet to reap a “liberation dividend” -- the shack-dwellers, the rural poor, the low-waged, the redundant and those outside or on the fringes of the formal economy.
read more
also see COSATU
No comments:
Post a Comment