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The South African Federation of Trade Unions is calling upon all workers to assemble in their thousands at Parliament in Cape Town on Wednesday 30 May 2018, when the debate on the laws to emasculate the working class and its trade unions is due to be completed.

This will be a massive show of strength by workers, from all unions and federations, members of no union, casual workers, informal traders, the unemployed, progressive civil society and all South Africans.

We shall be there to demand the scrapping of laws which are not only an attack on the trade unions but on the democratic rights of every South African. They will impose conditions and rules which will make it virtually impossible for trade unions to organize protected strikes, even after all attempts to reach a negotiated settlement have reached deadlock.

If passed these laws will shift the balance of power even more than it already is to the benefit of the employers. It effectively bans workers from exercising their constitutional right to strike and will turn them into slaves. The time has come to fight back!

We are also determined to continue the fight against the poverty national minimal wage of R20, R18, R15 and R11 an hour. In this, the world’s most unequal society, it is an outrage that the billionaire bosses of big business, and their representatives on the ANC benches in Parliament expect workers to be able to live on a wage that even the President himself concedes is not a living wage.

We demand a national minimum wage that is a living wage - the R12 500 a month demanded by the Marikana martyrs.
 
Despite all Saftu’s efforts to be heard, the shop stewards of white monopoly capital did not even acknowledge, let alone respond to, the memorandums from the masses of workers who marched on 25 April 2018.
 
Accordingly we are urging every leader of Saftu and its affiliated unions, every activist, shop steward and union member to join us inside and outside of Parliament, in line with the decision of the Saftu National Executive Committee. We are also calling on all those who support us in Parliament to get their voices heard in the chamber.
 
This is class warfare! It a life-and-death struggle to defend workers’ rights! It is battle we cannot afford to lose!

Issued by Saftu