Date: 30/04/2010
Source: Congress of South African Trade Unions
Title: Cosatu: Vavi: Speech by the Cosatu secretary-general to a Gala Dinner in honour of trade union stalwarts, East London
Tonight the trade union movement in the Eastern Cape is honouring its heroes. In Port Elizabeth the focus is on comrade Vuyisile Mini, with an address by COSATU 1st Deputy President comrade Tyotyo James. In Queenstown we are commemorating our first President, comrade Elijah Barayi, with a speech by NUMSA General Secretary comrade Irvin Jim. Here in East London we are honouring comrade Thozamile Gqweta.
I want to greet our special guests, COSATU CEC members, the PEC and COSATU East London Local leadership and the leadership of the ANC and the SACP at all levels. Thank you very much for your hard work to organise the dinner and the rally tomorrow.
Ladies and gentlemen
Comrades and friends
April is our heroes' month and May the workers' month. So there could not be a more appropriate night than the eve of May Day to remember our worker heroes, all the sons and daughters the working class and their leaders, and the fighting organisations they built. They constructed the firm foundations on which we build COSATU 25 years ago and which make it possible for us to take forward the militant and democratic traditions of our federation today.
This is night is about Thozamile Gwetha, Vuyisile Mini and Elijah Barayi in particular. But we must not forget countless others, including Chris Dlamini, Moses Kotane, JB Marks, Yure Mdyogolo, Mbuyiselo Ngwenda, Steven Dlamini, Moses Mabhida, Ray Alexander Simons, Gana Makhabeni, Oscar Mpetha, Billy Nair, Rita Ndzanga, Liz Abrahams, Curnick Ndlovu, John Nkadimeng, Archie Sibeko, Leslie Massina, Chris Dlamini, John Gomomo, Violet Seboni and many, many more.
Thozamile Gqweta, who passed away on Monday 25 September 2006, devoted his entire life to the service of his fellow workers. He was brutally tortured by the apartheid regime yet never flinched from his task of organising the working class and building the trade union movement.

He founded the South African Allied Workers' Union (SAAWU) in the Eastern Cape in 1978, five years after the Durban strikes. Its aim was to be the first non-racial workers' organisation in line with the Wiehahn Commission Report.

He was elected its president and under his leadership, SAAWU re-ignited revolutionary trade unionism after SACTU. It was a central component of the UDF in the mid-80s. In fact, the UDF was introduced to workers who were in the midst of a bus boycott. The bond between SAAWU and UDF affiliates - civic organisations, youth and women's groups - was so strong that today we can still see that tradition in our mass democratic movement.

A good example was the rapid spread of mass support for the Wilson-Rowntrees boycott in the early 80s. Some of the current political leaders entered political activity through the Wilson-Rowntrees boycott.

SAAWU soon earned the hostility of apartheid's Ciskei puppets and SAAWU leaders and activists suffered from unending harassment and many died at the hands of apartheid regime or its Bantustan puppets.
Thozamile Gqweta was repeatedly arrested, detained and beaten by the Ciskei police. In addition to the pain inflicted on his body, he suffered a series of personal tragedies which would have broken the spirit of many a lesser comrade.
In 1981 his mother, Nomentile Gqweta, and his uncle, King Gqweta, burnt to death after his home suspiciously caught fire. Just a week later security police opened fire on mourners returning from his mother's funeral, and killed his girlfriend.

But he stuck to his task, despite more detentions and beatings, as well as being indicted, arrested and then acquitted on charges of treason in 1985, together with other UDF activists.
SAAWU‘s style of organising workers was unique in that workers, rather than organisers, played the main role in recruitment of other workers.
The union expanded very rapidly throughout beyond East London to the rest of the country, supported by ANC underground structures. At no stage did SAAWU see itself as a mere bread-and-butter union. When workers were on strike, SAAWU always seized the chance to explain the evils of capitalism, so that workers could link their exploitation by their employer to the general exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class. This became a COSATU tradition which has its roots in SAAWU.

Any activity in its battles against exploitation was part of an advance towards freedom. SAAWU leaders were active in other liberation struggles and organisations, which earned them the wrath of the Pretoria regime.
Finally SAAWU and Comrade Thozamile played a crucial role in the formation of COSATU - the super Federation as it was called in the early 80s.
After 1994 he briefly worked in the Office of the Premier in the Eastern Cape, under Makhenkesi Stofile, before retiring to live in Mdantsane, East London. All his ill treatment in the 1980s affected his health and he spent a lot of time in hospital, culminating in the illness that led to his tragic death at only 54.
If he had been still with us last Tuesday he would have undoubtedly been joining the celebrations of the 16th anniversary of our freedom and democracy. He would have appreciated that human rights are enshrined into our constitution and laws, and that we live in a non-racial democracy where the government is elected by and responsible to the majority of the citizens.

We have laws that protect workers' rights and are supposed to oblige employers to treat their workers fairly and grant them minimum standards of pay, benefits and health and safety provisions. Millions have acquired new homes and education for their children; more and more receive social grants, health care and receive running water and electricity.

Equally however, I am sure he would have agreed that we have much more to achieve before we can say that all South Africans are truly free. We cannot ignore the 58% of South Africans who live in poverty and who cannot really benefit from political freedom, as they face a daily struggle to survive.

The 30%-35% of the working population who cannot find a job and the millions still living in shacks cannot fully celebrate their 'freedom' as they struggle to find ways to earn a decent living and live in a decent house.

South Africa has become the most unequal society in the world Nedbank CEO Tom Boardman has just had a 79% pay rise to lift his annual earnings to more than R43 million, and received shares valued at R25.5m! Such inequality mocks our struggle to build a free, fair and equitable society.

Capitalists find new ways to get rich by super-exploiting the working class and dodging around the labour laws. There is a continued restructuring of the working class into a two-tier labour market. The first layer of workers enjoys most of the rights contained in the constitution. They are covered by collective bargaining and enjoy better work security and better pay.

The second layer of workers are super-exploited, without any rights or freedom. Joining a union is a personal risk and upward job mobility a pipe-dream. They are a large and growing army of workers employed in low-paid, temporary, casualised jobs or employed through the enslaving labour broking system.

That is why claims that our labour laws are ‘too rigid' is nonsense. That is also why one of the clarion calls for this Freedom Day is for the banning of labour brokers, the human traffickers who we are determined to get rid of.

Gross inequalities in wealth distribution, health and education remain along racial lines. The fault lines of the apartheid economy remain largely intact.

It is mainly black children whose education is disrupted by poor learning infrastructure, classroom overcrowding, high dropout rates and unsafe schools. There are equally glaring discrepancies in health care, with a first-world service for the wealthy in the private sector and a third-world service for the poor in the public sector. White South Africans are blessed with 23 more years of life than their black counterparts.

We urge every South Africa to get tested and know their status and we call upon government to make sure that antiretroviral treatment reaches everyone who needs it, so that all people living with HIV ad Aids can live a full and productive life.

The highest levels of poverty and underdevelopment are also still experienced in the former Bantustans. The black working class, despite the construction of thousands of new houses, are still dumped far away from workplaces, forcing them to spend much of their low wages on ever-rising transport costs.

Workers bore the brunt of the recent capitalist crisis, caused by the capitalists' greed. In the first nine months of 2009 we lost 959 000 jobs, a new record, and workers lost a staggering R17 billion, further worsening the poverty and inequalities in our country. That is the underlying reason for all the angry service-delivery protests in our poorest communities.
The plight of workers is still worst of all on farms, where many employers think they still live in the days of apartheid. They treat their workers no better than slaves, ignore the labour laws, abuse and even murder those who stand up for their constitutional and legal rights, evict families from their homes and even refuse to let workers bury their family members on farms where they have workers all their lives. There is no 'freedom' for these citizens of the new South Africa.

Also denied the full fruits of our freedom are the millions who suffer from HIV/AIDS and other deadly diseases - many of them diseases of poverty. COSATU warmly welcomes the HIV/Aids Counselling and Treatment Campaign which was launched by President Zuma on 25 April 2010. It marks a declaration of war on this pandemic which is still destroying hundreds of lives.

We congratulate the government on their historic new campaign to persuade every South African to get themselves tested for the virus, and to get antiretroviral treatment to everyone who needs it.

We must however always remember that our freedom was not won without struggle and sacrifice. Thousands of members of the liberation movement were arrested, jailed, exiled, tortured or even sacrificed their lives to help free our nation from racist tyranny.

Workers must never forget Thozamile Gqweta. Without his passion for the cause, dedication to the struggle and willingness to suffer injury, personal tragedy and even death, we might have waited many years longer for national liberation and the strong united trade union movement we have today.
We owe it all to heroes like him and must make sure that his memory lives on to inspire new generations of trade unionists and revolutionaries.
Let us remember them in the way they would have wished - by rededicating our movement to the struggle for the liberation of humankind and a socialist world order! The struggle for a socialist South Africa continues!