The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has launched a new project that will focus on making sure the lives of the poor and workers are improved, it announced on Wednesday.
The project has been named ”Walking Through the Open Doors”.
The decision to form this project was taken by Cosatu’s central executive committee in May.
According to the trade-union federation’s general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, the project was to ensure that resolutions taken at the African National Congress (ANC) Polokwane conference in December were prioritised.
”If you look at our economy for the past 10 years, it benefited only the capitalists.”
He said the economy had grown but the poor and the workers had not benefited.
”We have a huge crisis of about 35% to 40% of our people who are unemployed. We have a crisis of poverty and inequalities.”
Vavi said South Africa was sitting on a ticking time bomb because issues affecting the majority had been ignored in the past 10 years.
He said the Walking Through the Open Doors project was a strategy to ensure that Cosatu was represented in a balanced manner in the country’s political scene.
”We have to participate in the development of policies and programmes to drive economic transformation and labour-market transformation.”
Cosatu president Sdumo Dlamini quoted the Freedom Charter, where it says, ”the economy and the wealth shall be shared”.
The two said the project’s aim was to ensure that the ANC’s election manifesto contained key priorities, which were to deal with unemployment, poverty, crime and improve the education and healthcare systems.
These were the resolutions of the Polokwane conference, which must not be abandoned, said Vavi.
Walking Through the Open Doors has a panel of economists, a retirement-fund team, a labour-market team and an overall reference team for its first phase.
Phase two deals with issues of politics and governance focus — where the public sector, industrial policy and social protection issues would be dealt with.
Cosatu said it had placed a time frame of three to five years for the project to make a significant, measurable impact in the identified areas. — Sapa