Latest news with #TerryBell
eNCA
14-05-2025
- Business
- eNCA
Latest data paints grim picture for job seekers
File: A job seeker's CV. Getty Images/peepo JOHANNESBURG - Over 200,000 more people are jobless in South Africa. According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey published by Stats SA, the unemployment rate increased to 32.9 percent in the first three months of the year. This means over eight million people are currently without jobs. There were losses across sectors, including trade and construction. Labour analyst Terry Bell discusses this further.
The Citizen
02-05-2025
- Business
- The Citizen
Workers' deal just gets tougher
What never changes, though, is that the rich will get richer and the workers will work harder for less. In reality, workers around South Africa would have done little celebrating yesterday, Workers' Day. Even the ones enticed or pressured to attend rallies addressed by ANC ministers pretending to have the 'common touch' would have found little to get down and party about. Times are tough for most workers in this country, pressed by rising prices and incomes which are not keeping up with inflation and looking over their shoulders about possible retrenchments as companies struggle to keep their heads above water. ALSO READ: Celebrating Workers' Day with no work? Unemployment forum boycotts the day Some business owners might point to the raft of worker-friendly laws passed since 1994 as the reason companies are battling… and because of this, they are hiring fewer people. Though they won't say it publicly, they hire foreigners because it is perceived they will work for less and won't go to organisations like the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration for fear of exposing their immigration status. Yet, on a moral balance, the laws the ANC has pioneered have brought much greater protection to a class of people who were hitherto powerless and at the whims of employers. Workers in South Africa are better off than in many other countries because of this. ALSO READ: Govt increases minimum wage – here's how much domestic workers should earn from 1 March However, there is no doubt that, complaints by big business notwithstanding, unions in our country have been far less disruptive than in the past. Is it because their leaders have sold out for a comfy life? Let's not forget that our billionaire president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was once a firebrand mineworkers' leader. As veteran labour expert Terry Bell notes today, the muted marking of Labour Day reflects that workers and organised labour are uncertain about the future because of developments like artificial intelligence, which will change the nature of work forever. What never changes, though, is that the rich will get richer and the workers will work harder for less. READ NEXT: Numsa demands wage increase, night shift allowance for motor industry workers
News24
01-05-2025
- Politics
- News24
Workers' Day: have trade unions lost their way?
Terry Bell remembers the heritage of the Haymarket Martyrs. For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page. For most trade unions and worker movements around the world, May Day 2025 will be celebrated more with a whimper than a bang. The widespread jubilation, pride and determined optimism of the fairly recent past will be missing as a largely weakened and fragmented labour movement struggles to grapple with 21st Century reality. Times have changed — and are certainly changing ever more rapidly as the proclaimed Fourth Industrial Revolution gathers pace. The future of work and, therefore, the future of trade unions is now uncertain. The gains of recent years — even, in some regions, the gains of many decades — are threatened or are being clawed back. There are also echoes now from over the past century of the rise of authoritarianism fuelled by racist, religious and even linguistic nationalisms, which have morphed in some regions into ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter. The prime sufferers, once again, are the working people, employed and unemployed. And it is the resilience and fortitude of often brutalised and exploited workers who organised to become a bulwark against greater deprivations visited upon the poor and dispossessed that May Day traditionally celebrates. Theirs was a long, hard, and often bloody road that, especially given the present economic and social context, needs to be studied and understood by anyone hoping for a better and more democratic world. In Chicago, in May 1886, a peaceful mass rally of workers who dared to dream of a truly democratic future was attacked by police. That gave us May Day as a celebration of courage and fortitude. And like the "Durban Moment" strikes of February and March 1973, which gave rise to the modern South African union movement, that single event had a history that echoes across the years. In Chicago, four activists, two of them journalists, one a printer and the other a carpenter, became the victims of what is widely described as a legal lynching. They were among the organisers of a rally calling for an eight-hour working day to be introduced. They were arrested and sentenced to be hanged. Seconds before they died together on the gallows, journalist August Spies shouted: "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." That statement reverberated around the world and, in 1890, the "Haymarket martyrs" were honoured by naming 1 May as the day of labour solidarity. There are many echoes from quite recent local history of that travesty in the United States and the events leading up to it. In our part of the world village, it was a largely democratic, worker-led and militant trade union movement that fought against incredible odds to help bring about the transition that we celebrated this week as Freedom Day. Yet the union movement is weaker today and more fragmented, at a time when the reality of a greedy and exploitative minority dominating and profiting from the labour of the majority is, if anything, clearer than a century ago: the overall social and economic circumstances that gave rise to unity among sellers of labour the world are still present. But what has happened over the past century has been the gradual absorption of much of the labour movement into the profit-driven system. With few exceptions, trade unions have, to varying degrees, lost their way; they have become bureaucratic replicants of the very system they were founded to oppose. At the same time, there is the constant call to "go back to basics". Yet the most basic principle — unity of all workers — is still not widely acted on. This principle was summed up in a poem written in 1820 by Percy Bysshe Shelley after troops killed peaceful worker protesters in England in 1819. The pertinent stanza reads: "Rise, like lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number!/ Shake your chains to earth like dew/ Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many—they are few!" This idea of the democratic unity of the majority of exploited humanity was even more clearly spelled out 28 years later by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels when they provided the slogan: "Workers of all countries unite!" They added: "You have nothing to lose but your chains." Those chains are still very much still in place and May Day is a time to review this reality. For trade unions, it is not a matter of adapt or die, but rather how organised labour can, may or will adapt as finite resources are plundered, mass murders are sanctioned and the planet becomes increasingly polluted in the cause of private profit. It is a grim outlook. But workers are still organised and there are small, but quite strong signs that new, highly democratic, unions are emerging, often from previously unorganised workers. A return to the basic principles of the labour movement is possible, and it is essential for the sake of the future.
