Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi has urged members to campaign for the governing party in the local government election in spite of the legal battles the labour union federation is fighting with the ANC-led government over wages.
In her opening address at Cosatu’s central committee meeting on Monday, Losi warned that if elected to govern, the opposition DA would scrap all progressive labour laws enacted by the ANC.
“As we end this central committee meeting on Thursday, let us go out and mobilise our members, their families and workers throughout our land to vote in their numbers and ensure that we return the ANC to office on 1 November,” she told the central committee members.
Relations between the two allies have been strained of late with the federation taking the ANC-led government to court over its unwillingness to implement the final part of a three-year wage agreement they signed at the bargaining council in 2018.
On August 24 its public sector unions, including the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu), approached the Constitutional Court to challenge the 2020 ruling by the Labour Appeal Court that upheld a Treasury decision not to conclude the public sector deal due to a lack of money.
The nonimplementation of the final part of the agreement — which would have cost R38bn — came after former finance minister Tito Mboweni pencilled in huge cuts to the public sector wage bill. In June, Mboweni told an investment conference that the Treasury would not back down on its insistence that any wage agreement for state workers must not breach the government’s fiscal ceiling.
“We are all disappointed with the behaviour of many of our comrades in government. But let us not delude ourselves into thinking that workers will be better off with the ANC defeated,” Losi said.
“The DA will scrap all our progressive labour laws, including the national minimum wage that has improved the wages of 6-million workers.”
The ANC has always depended on Cosatu’s grassroots structures to win national elections and Losi’s remarks on Monday could boost the party whose fortunes have dwindled in recent years.
Losi, a key ally of President Cyril Ramaphosa, told the meeting the credibility of the government and the ANC are battered. “The challenges are steep. The economy is bleeding. Many organs of state have collapsed or are falling apart,” she said. The war against corruption needs to be intensified.
The Cosatu leader said billions were lost from the fiscus due to corruption, wasteful expenditure and tax evasion. Ramaphosa, who was elected president of the party and the country on an anticorruption ticket in February 2018, has conceded that corruption is rife in government and that the ANC is “accused number one” in terms of corruption.
While the ANC has its faults, she said, it has worked with the labour federation to pass a number of labour laws beneficial to workers, including the national minimum wage.
Losi called on Cosatu to “force” municipalities to deliver on their mandates to provide basic services to communities, tackle corruption and the outsourcing of services, and pay workers on time.
During Freedom Day celebrations on April 27, Ramaphosa called on communities to use their vote to deal with councillors with a poor record of meeting their promises.
An Ipsos poll last week showed declining support for the ANC, putting it at 49% nationally, down from the 57.5% it won in the 2019 general election. The DA, the polling indicates, failed to capitalise and is down three percentage points to 18%. The EFF posted significant growth at 15%, up from 11%.
The ANC, which has been dogged by financial, operational and administrative challenges, lost control of the crucial metros of Johannesburg, capital city Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay to DA-led coalitions during the 2016 municipal elections.
The DA’s shadow minister of employment & labour, Michael Cardo, said it is extraordinary that Cosatu should continue to support the ANC given its failures in government. Losi acknowledges all of this “and yet still pledges the trade union’s loyalty to the ANC. It’s truly bizarre.”
“Perhaps the leadership of Cosatu needs to take a long, hard look at itself and ask whether it’s really serving workers’ interests. [It’s] certainly not serving the interests of the unemployed,” Cardo said.
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