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Jan de Lange

Numsa's Nazi tactics

Jan de Lange | Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:13
[miningmx.com] -- Dear Irvin,

Many people are hoping you will restore the status of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (Numsa) after this trade union has been playing second fiddle in trade federation Cosatu for easily a decade.

But this will only happen if you really take the lead and don't simply follow the masses as you, Cosatu president S'dumo Dlamini and Numsa president Cedric Gina did in Germiston on Wednesday evening.

The parliamentary portfolio committee's session in Gauteng on labour brokers was held to give ordinary people and smaller organisations the opportunity to say what labour broking is doing to their lives, how they experience it and what they think the solutions are.

Such processes are the building blocks of democracy; government by the people for the people. Not government by the majority for the majority - that's dictatorship for the majority, as in Nazi Germany. And you will undoubtedly agree that Germany under Adolf Hitler was no democracy, even though by far the majority of Germans supported him.

Don't doubt for a moment: what you and your approximately 1 000 supporters did in Germiston's Ekurhuleni Council chamber on Wednesday evening was brute, merciless dictatorship by the majority. It was much like Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938, the Night of Broken Glass when the Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and shops.

Yes, labour brokers cause enormous problems in our economy. They downgrade our workers' service conditions, as Mandla Khumalo of B&R Products said on Wednesday night.

Every time someone resigns or is dismissed, this employee is replaced by a contract worker from a broker and is paid one-third less with no medical cover, retirement benefits or even a contract of service.

Other workers find after years of faithful service that they are now suddenly working for a so-called contractor they've never seen who can dismiss them with the stroke of a pen.

Not just violent intimidation

That has happened to thousands of workers already, including Numsa members. And I am just as angry and disturbed as you are that people whose conditions of service and living conditions should improve in the course of time are undermined in this way because of a loophole in our so-called inflexible labour legislation.

Moreover, as Simon Diesel, a white Afrikaans-speaking contract worker in the steel and engineering industry, pointed out, the problem is not restricted to only one racial group.

You were loud in your applause for all those who agreed with you that labour brokers should be banned. And anyone whose views differed just one iota was simply shouted down, even though the parliamentary portfolio committee secretary, Shelly Makubela, asked you repeatedly to give them a chance.

And on those occasions when someone was actually given an opportunity to air an opposing view, your supporters waved sticks at the speaker and sang that the dissenter would be dealt with.

If that had happened in the street or at any other public meeting, it could be described as violent intimidation. But this wasn't just any meeting - the representatives of South Africa's parliament had come to hear what the people of Gauteng have to say about labour broking in all its various forms.

This isn't Numsa or Cosatu's parliament - it's for all of us. Everyone had the right to say their say. And the man in a red Cosatu T-shirt who threw a bottle at Plaatje Mashego of the Unemployed People's Party when he wanted to tell his story should be in jail for intimidation and assault.

He arrived there with you and left with you.

Perhaps Mashego represents nothing more than himself and his Gmail address, but Irvin, you know as well as I do why you were so afraid for him to be heard.

There are many people in our country who will do anything to earn a few cents, or even just to get a plate of food for some odd job. In Mbeki's day, the presidency one-man think tank Joel Netshitenzhe called them the lost generation.

Hope for the lost generation

With the resources of the presidency behind him, Netshitenzhe estimated their numbers at 10 million.

Hundreds of thousands of them are youths. Many others are older than 35, but have never had a job.

They are the main reason for the existence of labour brokers, because they do not accept that their fate is the same as that of the young unmarried mothers on street corners who are trying to live on social handouts and feed their children from leftovers in rubbish bins.

If you hadn't been so all-knowing and set on doing all the talking yourselves on Wednesday evening but had also been prepared to listen, you may perhaps have learnt something.

For example, if labour brokers are regulated correctly they could become a way for the lost generation to have some hope of finding their own little place in the sun.

You would have heard that many people who work for labour brokers on a temporary basis find permanent jobs after two or three years.

Or that an overall ban on labour broking would have as much success of preventing the lost generation from being exploited as a ban on premarital sex would have on preventing the spread of HIV/Aids.

In fact, the truth of the matter is that after a ban the bad apples among the labour brokers will only go deeper underground than they are now and malpractices will become even more rife.

Labour brokers are like cellphones, my friend. You can use them to keep in communication when you're moving around, or for robbing banks.

C'mon Irvin. Be a leader. Get a vision with which you can make the country a better place. Stop trying to gather trade union support for a political career - we have too many of those types already.

You may become an MP or even a minister, but it will be in a country with even more beggars than we have now.

Best wishes

Jan

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