Programme Director,
The Organised Labour Overall Convenor, Comrade Gerald Mkhomazi Twala,
Acting President SAFTU-Cde Mosima Maredi
Acting President NACTU- Cde Modupi Maile
President for COSATU- Cde Zingiswa Losi
President for FEDUSA- Cde Masale Selematsela
Executive Director Nedlac - Mr Makhukhu Mampuru
Leadership of COSATU, FEDUSA, NACTU and SAFTU,
Constituencies of Nedlac – Business, Community and Government,
Officials of the Department of Employment and Labour,
Comrades, Cadres of the Trade Union Movement, Fellow Workers,
Amandla! Viva the spirit of worker solidarity, viva! I bring you fiery revolutionary greetings, comrades, on behalf of the Minister of Employment and Labour, Honourable Nomakhosazana Meth, who has deployed me to this podium as a cadre of our shared cause, and on behalf of the Department of Employment and Labour in its entirety.
Let me salute the labour federations for once again convening this Mid-Term Labour School, this gathering of the toiling masses' most organised detachments.
That COSATU, FEDUSA, NACTU and SAFTU can sit under one roof, in the true spirit of Nedlac, to interrogate progress on the Annual Labour School declaration, is itself a small but hard-won victory for the unity of the working class. We meet here not as strangers but as comrades-in-struggle, bound by a shared, if sometimes contested, revolutionary commitment: that the dignity of the worker must never be sacrificed on the altar of profit, and that the exploitation of labour by capital is not a natural law but a social relation we have the power, together, to transform.
The theme of this School – building trade union activism for better wages and better working conditions , could not be more timely. It reminds every cadre in this hall that an injury to one remains an injury to all, that no gain wrung from capital is ever permanent unless the working class stands ready, daily, to defend it on the shop floor, in the boardroom, at the bargaining table, and in the corridors of this very institution. Aluta continua! The struggle continues!
Comrades, we gather at a moment of sharpening contradiction between capital and labour.
On one hand, our Constitution and our labour legislation – the LRA, the BCEA, the Employment Equity Act – remain among the most progressive in the world, the fruits of decades of organised struggle by the trade union movement and the broader Congress movement.
On the other hand, the lived reality of the toiling masses tells a harsher story: precarious and informalised work, the casualisation of labour through labour broking and platform “gig" arrangements, the ruthless super-exploitation of vulnerable and migrant workers, and a swollen reserve army of the unemployed that monopoly capital continues to use to discipline and depress the wages of those still in work, reproducing apartheid-era patterns of dispossession along lines of race, gender and geography.
We cannot pretend that the class struggle in the workplace has been resolved by legislation alone. Capital, left to its own devices, will always seek the cheapest, most flexible, least organised labour it can find; that is its nature, not an accident of policy. Our task, as a developmental state in revolutionary alliance with organised labour – is to close the gap between the rights that exist on paper and the enforcement that makes those rights real, felt, and lived on the factory floor, on the farm, in the mine, and in the kitchen.
This is why the question of labour inspection, of a functioning CCMA, and of a UIF and Compensation Fund that pay out when workers need them most, is not administrative housekeeping. It is class politics by other means, the National Democratic Revolution advancing itself in the terrain of the workplace.
On labour inspectors, comrades, let us not romanticise our starting point. For too long our inspectorate has been starved and stretched thin – a mere few thousand inspectors expected to hold the line against exploitation across an economy of well over a million workplaces. The International Labour Organisation itself recommends at least one inspector for every ten thousand workers in a transitioning economy; historically we have fallen far short of that revolutionary minimum, leaving capital largely unpoliced on the shop floor.
That is why the Department, under the leadership of the President and the Minister, has launched Project 20,000 – a phased mobilisation to add 10,000 permanent labour inspectors this financial year, with a further phase to follow, backed by an allocation of some R5 billion set aside over the medium-term expenditure framework. This is not a cosmetic gesture, comrades – it is the state arming itself, in the interests of the working class, against decades of unchecked wage theft and unsafe conditions.
Alongside this mobilisation, entry-level on the backs of unprotected workers is closing. Compliance with the rights of the working recruitment has already opened posts for inspectors, client service officers and compliance cadres in labour centres across the country.
When fully implemented, this will more than treble our capacity to enter the workplace, expose exploitation, and root out unsafe conditions, wage theft, and the abuse of undocumented and vulnerable workers.
We say to errant, exploitative employers, plainly and without apology: the era of paying a small fine and continuing to extract surplus value class is not optional, and the state is rebuilding the muscle, the boots on the ground, to make sure of it.
On the CCMA, comrades, we must speak honestly: justice delayed for the retrenched worker or the victimised shop steward is justice denied, and a movement built on the shop floor cannot accept a dispute-resolution body that moves slower than the capital it is meant to hold in check. The Commission continues to carry a heavy caseload of unfair dismissals, unfair labour practices and organisational rights disputes.
We are committed to strengthening its capacity – through continued investment, digitised case referral, and capacity-building for bargaining councils so that the worker who has been unjustly dismissed does not wait months for a hearing date while the employer who wronged them continues about their business undisturbed. A worker's right to a swift, accessible and free remedy is a hard-won gain of our labour dispensation, forged in 1995, and we will not allow it to be eroded by bureaucratic neglect.
On UIF and the Compensation Fund, comrades, we recognise the anger of workers who have waited too long for benefits after retrenchment, or for compensation after being maimed or made ill in the service of profit. This government has taken a bold structural step: proposals were tabled before the Portfolio Committee on Employment and Labour to reposition both the UIF and the Compensation Fund as standalone Schedule 3A public entities, with greater operational autonomy but full public accountability to the working class that funds them. The objective is uncompromising – modern, efficient systems that pay claims in days, not months, that treat the injured and the retrenched worker with dignity rather than suspicion. Our service charter already commits the UIF to finalising ninety-five percent of complete claims within five working days, and recent amendments to COIDA have strengthened protections for workers injured or made ill in the course of production.
A capable, worker-centred state is not measured by the eloquence of its policy documents, but by whether the worker on the ground feels its presence in their pocket and in their recovery.
Let us also, comrades, in the spirit of honest revolutionary reflection demanded by a Mid-Term School, record what the organised working class has forced this state to deliver:
None of these gains, comrades, fell from the sky, and none were gifted by the goodwill of capital. Each is the product of pressure and organised struggle from this very federation of federations, from shop stewards on the ground, from workers who marched, who downed tools, who submitted memoranda, who negotiated without flinching, and who refused, generation after generation, to be silent.
Comrades, the theme of this School calls on us to build trade union activism, and let us be candid and self-critical, as good cadres of the movement must be activism that lives only in resolutions and declarations, and dies the moment delegates leave this hall, builds nothing and liberates no one. Real activism means shop stewards trained, conscious and confident to use the CCMA as a weapon of struggle; workers who know their UIF and COIDA rights by heart and demand their realisation without begging; branch structures that hold employers, and indeed hold this Department itself, accountable to the letter and the revolutionary spirit of our labour laws.
The state cannot wage this struggle alone, comrades, nor should it try to. Nedlac was built precisely on the understanding that social dialogue between labour, business, community and government produces more durable, more legitimate victories than any single actor imposing its will by decree.
We call on organised labour to remain the vigilant, militant conscience of this social compact to push us when we are slow, to hold the line when capital seeks to claw back hard-won gains, and to march with us as comrades when the state moves to expand and defend the protections of the working class.
Comrades, the struggle for a living wage, for dignified working conditions, and for a labour market free of exploitation, is not a chapter that closes with the formal end of apartheid rule. It continues, unbroken, in every wage negotiation, every CCMA hearing, every inspection carried out, every UIF claim finalised or delayed. Let this Mid-Term Labour School renew our shared, unyielding resolve to build a labour market rooted in social justice, decent work, worker dignity, and the steady advance of the National Democratic Revolution toward a genuinely liberated working class.
I thank you, comrades. Forward with worker solidarity, forward! An injury to one is an injury to all! The struggle continues, Aluta continua! Amandla! Awethu!
© 2019 - The South African Department of Employment & Labour
