Only a few thousand people turned up to march through central Cape Town on Monday as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) called a one-day strike in protest against job losses.
About 27 000 turned up for a similar march in June this year, but police said Monday’s total was only about 5 000.
Cosatu Western Cape provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich disputed the police figure, saying the total was in fact 25 000, and that he was not disappointed with the turnout.
”Clearly the workers are reaffirming the message to both government and business that there’s hardships, and something needs to be done,” he said. ”Thousands of workers are willing to lose a day’s pay to make this point. That must tell you that there’s a crisis.”
A few minutes later, he told the marchers that the media were going to suggest that ”only 200” workers took part in the march.
”But you will know that they are lying, because there’s more than 30 000 workers right down to the end,” he said.
Outside Parliament, Cosatu president Willie Madisha handed a memorandum to Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies, which said that in the first quarter of this year alone, the formal sector shed more than 130 000 jobs.
It called on the government to exert stronger pressure on business to save jobs, do more to ensure a competitive rand (which would be more favourable for exports) and buy locally.
Madisha, who claimed the strike had resulted in ”total shutdown” of the clothing industry in the Western and Eastern Cape, said the government has to make sure it is impossible for employers to ”simply go on and dismiss workers like the employers are doing today”.
The government bears the blame for the flood of cheap imports from China and other places, which leads to ongoing job losses in local factories.
”They, as government, have got to move with us in making sure there are safeguards, that our people are protected … We are faced with a crisis in South Africa,” said Madisha.
Taking the memorandum, Davies said he will ”pass it on” and try to ensure it is taken seriously.
”We need to make sure that … organisations like Nedlac [the National Economic Development and Labour Council], we need to make sure that these organisations of social dialogue function properly and that we hear the proposals of each of the different sides about how we’re going to deal with these problems of job losses, casualisation, jobs being lost through imports and so on,” Davies said.
He said the government has proposals of its own, among them for an industrial strategy for the clothing industry, aspects of which overlap with Cosatu’s suggestions.
Cosatu said in the memorandum that its June strike had yielded ”some positive results”, and that some threatened retrenchments in mining and the clothing industry had been reversed or at least substantially reduced. — Sapa