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Press Release, 29 April 2015 COSATU KwaZulu-Natal ready to host the main May Day Rally 2015 The Congress of South African Trade Unions, (COSATU) in KwaZulu-Natal is honoured to host this year’s Mayday celebrations. The celebrations will begin with a march that will start at Gugu Dlamini Park and end with a massive rally at Curries Fountain Sports ground. The rally will be addressed by the national leadership of the federation and that of our alliance partners the ANC (President Zuma) and the SACP (Cde Blade Nzimande). As COSATU in Kwa-Zulu Natal, we are very much honoured to host these celebrations to mark this unique workers holiday; 30 years after the federation, COSATU, was formed here in our province, 60 years after the formation of SACTU and 60 years after the adoption of the Freedom Charter. The giant federation will be marking this special worker’s holiday in the midst of unprecedented challenges which forced us to act decisively in removing the cancer that was eating and corroding our values from within. Every single day, we realise that the hard decisions we took were not only correct but necessary, now that the truth has come out to the open about the formation of a new political party which stands to oppose the liberation as a whole. We will not waste our time about our detractors but will forge ahead to achieve the unity, organisational cohesion and discipline within our ranks. The political unity and coherency of our trade union movement is crystallised by the fact that an overwhelming number of our members are members and leaders of both the ANC and SACP. Our federation, COSATU is historically steeped in ideological and political traditions of the congress movement, as evidenced by the current medium-term strategy - the 2015 Plan that was adopted at the 8th Congress in 2003. Whilst we accept that COSATU is a trade union and will never be political party; but we accept that we have a responsibility to work with the SACP to achieve socialism. In this regard we remain deeply rooted in the ideological traditions of Marxism-Leninism; strongly devoted to the political strategy of the NDR and proud of our South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) heritage. Despite the current challenges, COSATU will continue to produce the kind of cadreship that is capable of robustly taking up the bread and butter issues of the workers and lead the socioeconomic campaigns to change people’s lives. Our main priority is to confront the challenges of extreme inequalities, unemployment, and abject poverty and to also attack the conditions which give rise to rampant capitalist exploitation and a culture of obscene personal accumulation. For us, May Day is a day where we denounce the inhumane capitalist system and fight against the super-exploitation of black working class in general and the African working people in particular. We continue to use this holiday to highlight the scourge of unemployment, slave wages and the escalating food, electricity and fuel prices. We remain rooted in the militant traditions of our forebears, who confronted colonial exploitation in the 1946 mine workers strike and took war to the Apartheid regime in the 1973 Durban Strikes. We remain adamant that we will never compromise our character and identity. We remain resolute to our time-honoured and tested ideological and organisational traditions and principles of One Country - One Federation; One Union - One Industry, worker Control, paid up membership and International Solidarity. Our war cry remains “an injury to one is an injury to all”. We are proud of our history as a fighting federation and as a home for all workers in South Africa. This whole episode is déjà vu for the federation. In 1986, hardly a year after the formation of COSATU, the IFP, funded by the apartheid regime through Adriaan Vlok's departmental funds, established a right-wing labour federation, the United Workers Union of South Africa (UWUSA), as a direct counter to COSATU. UWUSA today is in the dustbin of history and the IFP is a political carcass with no legitimacy nor direction. Workers have to ask whether the planned march by a newly formed opposition federation and a political party wannabe, represents the repeat of the history of UWUSA. History will show that UDM, COPE and EFF tried but failed to demagogically divide the workers and whip their emotions for narrow political ambitions. We have long accepted that, people will continue to attempt to divide and entice the workers away from pursuing the NDR and the struggle for socialism under the leadership of the ANC and the SACP respectively. These forces have made every attempt to stop workers from celebrating their hard won gains during this year’s May Day. It has become their modus operandi that what they cannot win on the ground, they, like DA will subject it to court processes. They have applied to interdict our May Day March and we are confident that they will fail like all chancers and fantasists. We are not defocused by the antics of those with vainglorious self regard and Messianic complexes. Our focus on this year’s Mayday will be on waging the worker’s struggles and those of the working class in general. We will use this day to denounce the draconian cuts announced by Finance Minister which have the potential of weakening the state capacity to deliver services for the poor majority. We will be denouncing the arrogance of the state in handling the public service wage negotiations. We will also highlight the objective challenges confronting metro municipalities such as infrastructural developments. The federation will be rallying together its affiliates and South Africans behind the campaign to fight against the possible partial privatisation of Eskom, SAA or any of the struggling key state-owned companies. We will be intensifying our campaign for free access to education and the overall transformation of the education sector focusing on the institutions of higher learning; where we demand that they focus on providing an alternative to the current mode of education production. We shall aggressively campaign for transparency on the roll-out of the Re-engineering of Primary Health Care and the release of the NHI white paper. On this Mayday, we shall also be calling for permanent employment of those who are in the Expanded Public Works Programme. We therefore invite all progressive forces and the citizens of the province to come out in their numbers to not only celebrate this worker’s holiday, but to defend COSATU. This organisation has been at the forefront of the society’s struggles for over three decades and will continue to do so, for years to come. The victories of the future for workers will not be won by Messianic or cult figures but will be achieved by workers themselves through their unity and solidarity. We fight for the freedoms we get and lose those we do not defend. May Day is Ours! All Workers to the Front! Viva COSATU Viva! Issued by COSATU KwaZulu-Natal Contact: Cde Edwin Mkhize COSATU KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Secretary Cell: 082 399 7756 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
