Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 894	8 June 2007

Public Services Strike Shakes South Africa

Workers Fight Neo-Apartheid Misery

June 4—In one of the biggest strikes in South African history, at least 700,000 hospital workers, teachers and other workers in 17 public service unions went out on June 1. Led by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), strikers are fighting for a desperately needed 12 percent raise in wages and improvements in medical and other benefits. Most schools were shut down, particularly in the townships, and picket lines went up at the largest hospitals in the country, from Durban to Johannesburg to Cape Town. Workers rallied in every major city, with 10,000 marching through downtown Johannesburg, shutting down the city center. Victory to the public workers strike!

The strike is just one indicator of the broad anger among the impoverished South African masses. For the past several years, waves of protests have swept South Africa’s townships and shantytowns protesting lack of water, electricity and decent housing. Unemployment stands at a staggering 40 percent, at least. School classes in rural areas are still held under trees. With more than 10 percent of the population infected with HIV, Minister of Health Tshabalala-Msimang still offers garlic, lemon and beetroot as treatment options while hospital workers struggle every day in vastly understaffed public hospitals and clinics, fetid hellholes for patients and staff alike. It is no surprise that on the first day of the strike, patients at Johannesburg General Hospital who were waiting hours to see doctors expressed support for the strikers.

President Thabo Mbeki of the African National Congress (ANC) and the capitalists he serves crow that the South African economy is “booming.” Thirteen years after the election of the bourgeois-nationalist ANC and the end of the hated apartheid system, the fundamental basis of South African capitalism is still the superexploitation of black labor by the white capitalist class and its senior partners in the City of London and Wall Street. The white bourgeois rulers have subcontracted out the task of administering neo-apartheid capitalism to the nationalist ANC-led government—the popular-front Tripartite Alliance that includes the South African Communist Party (SACP) and COSATU.

While a thin layer of black businessmen and politicians reaps the rewards, the conditions of the working class, rural toilers and township and shantytown masses continue to be miserable. As key components of the ANC-led regime, the leadership of the COSATU federation, whose unions are striking against government-enforced austerity, provides the labor face for bourgeois rule.

As the public service strike began, cops fired stun grenades at strikers picketing Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town. Today, police in Durban fired rubber bullets to disperse a crowd of striking nurses, arresting 20. According to the National Education Health & Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU), the cops in Cape Town threw tear gas into the crowd, injuring workers, including one who had to be hospitalized in intensive care. COSATU spokesman Patrick Craven issued a June 1 press release condemning the cop attacks that stated: “It is all the more shocking that the attacks were allegedly perpetrated by police officers whose unions are fully involved in the strike.”

There should be no “shock.” The cops were merely doing their dirty job for the bosses. It runs directly against the interests of the working class that the COSATU union federation includes the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU), which announced that it would participate in the strike by “working to rule.” Their “work” as enforcers of neo-apartheid capitalism was on display in the vicious attack at Tygerberg Hospital. In the Johannesburg area, one police unit is under investigation for torturing members of the South African Municipal Workers Union who had been on strike earlier this year. As we wrote in “Protest Apartheid-Style Police Brutality Against Union Bus Drivers!” (WV No. 893, 25 May), “The fact that the state, including the police forces and the army, contains many more black faces does not mean that it is any less an institution for capitalist oppression.” Spartacist South Africa, section of the International Communist League, says: Police, security guards and prison guards out of the unions!

The public service strike highlights the contradictions within the SACP—what V.I. Lenin called a bourgeois workers party—which encompasses outright nationalists and government ministers, labor reformists, and workers at the base who are open to a revolutionary perspective. At the outset of the strike, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande used the left side of his mouth to intone that it’s “better to get behind workers rather than hang on the aprons of the bourgeoisie.” The same SACP’s Ronnie Kasrils is head of the Intelligence ministry whose operatives intimidated members of the South African Democratic Teachers Union in the lead-up to the strike. As Public Service and Administration minister, former SACPer Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi got a court injunction—that nurses have defied—under which nurses could be fired for striking. Fraser-Moleketi acts as the hard cop against unions led by her “comrades,” the same role she played as an SACP leader in the government during the powerful 1999 public employees strike (see “South African Workers vs. ANC Capitalist Government,” WV No. 718, 3 September 1999).

A number of powerful unions in key industries are also threatening strike action, including the National Union of Mineworkers, the Communication Workers Union and the National Union of Metalworkers. The roiling anger in the proletariat points to the need to forge a new leadership in the unions through political struggle against the labor tops’ nationalist class collaborationism.

A revolutionary workers party must be built, not simply to defend the particular interests of the working class but to fight to eradicate all forms of national and social oppression—from the mass homelessness in the black townships and the hideous conditions trapping millions on “tribal homelands” to the degradation of women and the plight of immigrants. As we wrote in our article last issue, “Spartacist South Africa calls to break the Tripartite Alliance—for the class independence of the proletariat from the bourgeois parties and its state! What is necessary is the building of a revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist party, part of a reforged Fourth International, which can lead the proletariat and all the oppressed forward to achieve workers rule, as part of world socialist revolution.”