The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Frank Meintjies -
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is a giant, but a wounded one. For over 25 years, it has dominated the labour scene as the voice of organised workers. But now, there are big changes in the world of trade unions and rumblings that new forces are entering the scene. This has been brought to the fore with the emergence of Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and its rise to majority union status in the platinum sector.
Writing in the wake of Marikana,...
Mandisi Majavu -
One of the issues that the rape allegations against Zwelinzima Vavi highlighted is the unresolved discursive tension between feminists and anti-racists. This discursive tension stems from the way in which both the feminist and anti-racist intellectual tradition respectively regard sexuality as a site upon which the oppression of women and the repression of black masculinity occurs. Feminists understand rape as a violent patriarchal tool that some men use to assert their power over...
Richard Pithouse -
The living party, which ought to make possible the free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people, has been transformed into a trade union of individual interests. - Frantz Fanon, Tunis, 1961
It’ll be some time before we really know what happened in the National Working Committee (NWC) of the African National Congress (ANC) on Monday. But it seems clear enough that a majority of the NWC supported a proposal to bring disciplinary...
