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The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) - the world’s newest workers’ federation - is proud to join hands with millions of workers around the globe to celebrate our first and May Day. History was made on 21-23 April 2017 when SAFTU was born, and it will be made again when thousands take to the streets of Durban and elsewhere.

This is the day when workers, whose labour produces the wealth of the planet, celebrate their victories, remember their fallen heroes, demonstrate their solidarity as workers. It is when we stand up for our right to be treated with dignity and fight for a new socialist society in which exploitation, unemployment, insecurity, poverty, hunger and inequality will be banished into the dustbin of history.

The day is recognized in every country except, ironically, the United States and Canada, the countries where it all started, in the fight for an eight-hour working day in the 1880s at a time when workers were forced to work as long as sixteen hours a day.

In 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labour Unions passed a resolution that eight hours would constitute a legal day`s work from 1 May 1886. In the autumn of 1885, a leading union, the Knights of Labor, announced rallies and demonstrations for the following May - on the slogan of "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” 131 years later, that is a demand still to be achieved!

Workers, heeded the call and by April 1886, 250,000 were involved. In Chicago, police attacked striking workers and killed six. The next day, at a demonstration in Haymarket Square to protest against the police brutality, a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of police. Seven officers were killed and 66 injured.

The police turned their guns on the workers, killing and wounding demonstrators. It was never established who threw the bomb - an 'anarchist,' or a police 'agent provocateur’. Police rounded up hundreds of union activists throughout the country. Eight union leaders were put on trial. Seven of them had not been at the demonstration and the eighth was the speaker on the platform, so none of them could have thrown the bomb.

But legality was never the aim of that trial; they were only looking for scapegoats. The Chicago Tribune of the day gave the game away with the headline: "Hang an organiser from every lamp-post.”

One of the eight, August Spies, a leader of the anarchist International Working People's Association, made a powerful speech: "Your Honour," he began, "in addressing this court I speak as the representative of one class to the representative of another… If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement... the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in want and misery expect salvation - if this is your opinion, then hang us!

"Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you - and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out."

On 11 November 1887, four of the union leaders were executed.

To commemorate these ‘Haymarket Martyrs’ the International Working Men`s Association declared 1 May an international working class holiday and in 1904, the International Socialist Conference called on "all Social-Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on 1 May for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace."

The first May Day celebrations in South Africa were in 1904 and workers began a long fight for the recognition of their day as a special paid holiday dedicated to their demands for justice and freedom.

In 1986, unnerved by the new COSATU’s militancy, President P W Botha declared the first Friday in May as ‘workers’ day’ – a paid holiday. But COSATU said that it would take both 1 May and the first Friday. The Botha regime gave in and unwillingly bowed to the revolutionary call of the masses. Now May Day is one of the country’s twelve official paid public holidays, and we can remember the martyrs of our struggle against colonialism and apartheid and confront our new challenges.

And these challenges are immense. May Day is as important as ever, particularly here in South Africa.

SAFTU’s task is to respond to the desperate plight of millions of workers and the poor and overwhelmingly black women and men who are struggling from day to day just to keep their families alive and healthy, who live on nothing but poverty wages or pathetic social grants, or in many case just the generosity of family and friends to keep them alive.

They have yet to see the future promised by the Freedom Charter of a South Africa which “belongs to all who live in it, black and white” and where “the national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people”. And the situation is getting even worse. With unemployment already at one of the highest levels in the world, thousands more jobs are now under threat.

A growing number of the remaining jobs are insecure and low-paid, as outsourcing, casualisation and exploitation by labour brokers continue unabated. An army of vulnerable and powerless workers is growing, as many employers try to destroy collective bargaining and drive down wages to the lowest level which desperate workers are prepared to accept.

Inequality is the widest in the world. The Codesa settlement of 1994, which gave people democratic rights and freedoms, ensure that the economy would remain firmly in the hands of the white, male monopoly capitalists from the apartheid era, and so it remains today. Inequality is present in the provision of services.

Top-quality education, health care, housing and transport are available for the rich minority with the money to pay. The poor majority have to suffer from underfunded schools, sum housing, understaffed hospitals and overcrowded and dangerous public transport.

And all these problems are made even worse for the workers and the poor by the ongoing racism by employers who still think they live in the days of apartheid, and by the corruption by political and business leaders in both the private and public sectors, which robs people of the money desperately need to improve these services.

This looting of public resources involves not just the president and the Gupta family but a capitalist system which in inherently corrupt, based on the theft of the surplus value created by the sweat of workers’ labour.

Meanwhile the trade union movement is fragmented and weak The Department of Labour records 184 registered trade union entities and many more are unregistered or in the process of being registered. 76% of formal workers are not organised in any union, many of them in the most vulnerable sectors those employed by labour brokers, and part-time or casual workers who have no permanent employer of workplace. And these are the workers in greatest need of a strong trade union.

Existing federations which ought to be their champions have caved in to the employers and government, with their acceptance of a minimum wage which is below the poverty line and their willingness to agree to legal measures to sabotage workers hard-fought-for and constitutional right to strike.The once mighty COSATU has become an appendage of the ruing ANC and is embroiled in its bitter factional fights.

SAFTU has resolved to prioritise the millions of workers who are unorganized or members of unions which do nothing for them. We shall also target the most marginalized and lowest paid workers but also the unemployed and small traders.

Our goal is to revive the hopes of working class, building a mighty mass movement and mobilise workers and poor communities at work and on the streets, to assert their power and start the fight-back.

The new leadership will move swiftly to tackle these tasks, because time is not on our side. If we do not urgently confront the quadruple challenge of unemployment, poverty, inequality and corruption, if workers cannot turn the tide and fight back against their appalling conditions of life, we shall slide into a new age of barbarism in which workers and the poor will, as always suffer most.

The main SAFTU march will be in Durban and it will also be celebrating the 30th anniversary of our affiliate NUMSA, which was launched in 1987.

Marchers will assemble at Curries Fountain at 9h00 and march via Pixley ka Seme (formerly West) Street to Durban City Hall. Speakers will be Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of SAFTU, Irvin Jim, General Secretary of NUMSA and leaders of other SAFTU affiliated unions.

Issued by South African Federation of Trade Unions