NUMSA CELEBRATES 34 YEARS OF UNBROKEN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM FOR THE WORKING CLASS


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NUMSA CELEBRATES 34 YEARS OF UNBROKEN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM FOR THE WORKING CLASS
23 May 2021
For immediate release
This month the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is celebrating 34 years of unbroken struggle for genuine freedom and equality for the working class. FOSATU (now known as COSATU) consolidated a number of unions including MAWU and NAAWU to form NUMSA in May 1987. NUMSA has always been a union which consistently finds itself between a rock and a hard place. During the dark days of Apartheid, the union had to rise to the occasion and challenge the racist Apartheid regime. We fought back against the system. The unions shop stewards died at the hands of police, its leadership across various levels had to face the brutality of the racist Apartheid police, that was very vicious and maimed and dealt with the Black and African majority very violently. The union had to ensure that it challenges the super- exploitation of black and African labour and brought about what we characterize in 1994, as the democratic breakthrough. As we were ushering in the new democracy, we insisted that the old must die and the new must be born. We needed a thorough-going transformation and a thorough-going National Democratic Revolution. And fundamentally for NUMSA this has been about ensuring that the fundamentals of the revolution are addressed. That issues of ownership and control of the economy and the land question must be addressed.
Twenty-seven years of democracy have been hard years for the union within the ANC and the (tri-partite) Alliance where we demanded and championed that there must be indeed this fundamental change. We had to say “No” to the dislodgment of the Freedom Charter, and the dislodgement of the Reconstruction and Development Program by Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). And we had to fight the austerity measures that accompanied GEAR, that liberalized trade, that removed exchange controls, and that allowed for the dumping of production within our own country. We fought back and we resisted. And when it was time to move away from “One union, one federation one industry”, we said that what the then federation COSATU needed to do was to live up to the global challenges, and to accept that capital was not standing still. It needed to restructure itself, and that there was a need to organize along the value chain, like other sister unions all over the world like IG Metall, our sister union which is part of the global federation IndustriAll. Of course, we paid a price for this, because we challenged and rejected the neo-liberal agenda of the ANC. Because they were de-industrializing the country and destroying jobs, we decided that the alliance was not working, and it was time for workers to sit down and begin to chart a new path.
The union has risen to the occasion, in that as a result of being consistent in the revolution, at its Special National Congress in 2013 it took a decision not to support the ANC. As a result of this NUMSA was expelled from COSATU in November 2014. And obviously this led to us crystalizing the federation SAFTU, and that also led to us laying the building blocks for a vanguard party of

the Revolution. Today we have got SRWP a party of the revolution the SRWP. We must make a clarion call to every member of NUMSA and to every shop steward that we must build this party to be the party of the revolution. That must raise the levels of consciousness of the working class to be a conquering force, where the working class must actually see itself as a class for itself to resist the neo- liberal agenda, in order to reject the continuation of the old order where the minerals of this country are taken out of this country without being beneficiated, and without being localized.
As a union we must live up to our true vision of making sure that we deal with de-industrialization that has been caused by GEAR and austerity measures and we must be firm that indeed the democratic government must take ownership and control of the minerals of this country. They must be beneficiated. At the back of them we must champion industrialization, manufacturing and a job led industrial strategy so that the children of the people of this country, the sons and daughters of the working class can ensure that they have jobs.
As we celebrate 34 years of the union we are carrying the burden of making sure that we break new ground, and we must take up the fight for industrialization. But not just that, we must protect and defend collective bargaining and ensure that workers of this country can’t continue to be paid starvation wages, and that we must fight for a living wage. That’s what we are doing in this round of negotiations in the engineering sector. In Eskom we have the added task of defending our SOE’s against the neo-liberal right wing government of the ANC that is basically collapsing our current SOE’s. We must defend and protect privatization of our country’s energy provision, because at the back of Eskom and energy that is owned and controlled by the people, we must be able to champion manufacturing, industrialization and defend a competitive electricity tariff.
It is against these struggles that we are celebrating these 34 years in May, and as a union we must take them forward. Whilst we are looking back and celebrating 34 years of militant mobilization, Metalworkers all over the country across various sectors of the economy, in the mining industry and in the value chain in the aviation, infrastructure, engineering, motor and across all sectors in the economy, must go all out to help us recruit members at all 52 locals of NUMSA. The union must remain a democratically owned and controlled union from the shop floor.
For as long as the majority of black and African people are still living below the poverty line there is no freedom. The class struggle continues, and therefore NUMSA has no choice but to organize the working class as a class for itself. We must continue the work of raising working class levels of consciousness in order to overthrow capitalism, which is nothing more than a system of greed, and replace it with a Socialist system that advances humanity.
Amandla!
Issued by Irvin Jim
NUMSA General Secretary
For more information, please contact:
Phakamile Hlubi-Majola
0833767725
phakamileh@numsa.org.za