Workers News - Fight for your lives against privatisation

Welcome, comrades to the New Year! In the last issue of Workers' News, I raised the point that all of us in elected positions were renewing our mandate. Now all of us, as members of SAMWU have a new mandate from Congress. We emerge out of Congress a united face which is geared to take workers struggle forward. Provinces came to Congress with different positions - through a process of open debates we managed to reach consensus on most of the discussions. This shows political maturity and cohesion. I want to look at the most critical challenges we have to face in the next three years. The credentials presented at Congress showed that we have not increased our lost membership in the past three years. We must start an organising campaign to meet the target we have set for ourselves. We need to have a programme of empowering women. We have concentrated much resources on a few leaders who are empowered already. For me that is not enough if we want to build a strong women's layer in the union. We have received reports of workers who died while performing their council duties. The challenge facing us is this: what programmes are we putting in place to make sure that we reduce deaths on duty, especially in the electricity and sewerworks departments. We also need to look at health and safety committees because our role in these issues has been very poor in nearly all local authorities