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THE SMART NEWS SOURCE | Feb 10 2012 02:52 | LAST UPDATED Feb 10 2012 02:52 |
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Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi's salary has doubled to R500 000 a year, the Starreported on Wednesday. "My salary doubled because we were losing all the policy capacity in the federation," said Vavi. "The economists and accountants were all gone, because if you keep the salary at R250 000, it means the economists can't make those sacrifices for years and years. They lose out." The newspaper said Cosatu administrators and researchers earned about R7 000 per month while security guards earned less than R4 000. Vavi said several staff members in "economic" positions received 100% increases this year. But the lower earning staff received only 15% wage hikes, reported the newspaper. Vavi has been a vocal critic of South African Communist Party leader Blade Nzimande, who as Higher Education and Training Minister, recently bought himself a R1-million car. 'Transform the economy' Meanwhile, Vavi on Tuesday urged the government to transform the economy, saying the market-driven polices of the past were to blame for poor delivery and, in part, the recession. The answer was fostering a mass socialist movement, true to Marxist principles and built around the SACP, he told unionists in Limpopo.  CONTINUES BELOW "The underlying cause of the crisis that is now ravaging working class communities is the mistaken policies between 1996 and 2004, of cutting tariffs and privatising basic services and the conservative fiscal and monetary policies pursued in those years, centred on the misguided belief in inflation targeting and the urge to appease the narrow interests of financial markets," he said. "There are still some who continue to hold on to this wrong belief," he told the national congress of the South African Municipal Workers' Union (Samwu). "Relying on market forces has not only entrenched the inequalities of the past but further widened them, making us the most unequal society on the planet." Vavi said service delivery protests were therefore a symptom of structural problems in the economy and proved that working class communities were losing patience. It was time to implement the policy decisions taken at the African National Congress's watershed conference in Polokwane to restructure the economy to create industrial growth and decent jobs, he added. - Sapa TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
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