It was May Day, also known as Workers’ Day, on Wednesday yet many would be forgiven for their need to be reminded or even schooled on what the day is supposed to mean to the toiling masses of the working class the world over. The world, and indeed the workplace, has changed so much since the days of Karl Marx’s clarion call: “Workers of the world unite; for you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
May Day came approximately a month ahead of what observers have predicted will be watershed elections in South -Africa, almost on par with the liberation first polls of April 27-30, 1994 when the majority in this country finally got a taste of this thing called freedom.
It is an election being held in a vastly different South Africa from that of 1994.
But the struggles of the working class have always been so intertwined with those of the people at large that there’s no telling the difference, if there’s any at all.
So, the commemoration of May Day has always been of political significance in SA, but there’s no denying that “the times they are a’changing”. For years workers fought and some even laid down their lives for recognition of the day on these shores and with it the rights denied by the apartheid madness that refused people basic rights based solely on the colour of their skins.
So much was the callousness of the depraved system that it sought to even determine what would be designated as a workers’ day in service of an ideology and the even more ludicrous idea of trying to erase socialist and communist thoughts out of workers’ minds. Of course it served only to make the people on the work floor even more determined to free themselves.
In marking Freedom Day about two weeks ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa sought to highlight the gains made by SA, coming a long way from the depravation of apartheid. He said the economy, despite not doing as well as it could, was much bigger than the apartheid economy which by 1994 was on a deathbed, thanks to the stinging international sanctions and isolation of the crumbling apartheid regime.
The numbers tell the story, he said, with 16.7-million people employed today, more than double the 8-million in 1994.
But it would be ridiculous for anyone, Ramaphosa included, to claim all is well. Far from it. The struggle for the vast majority continues in the quest for a more equitable society, and the workplace, different as it is from that of 1994, still remains a coalface of this noble pursuit.
The economy has been shedding jobs by their hundreds of thousands, a situation worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, but the contribution of an inept government that chipped in with its mismanagement of state-owned enterprises, which have contributed to the haemorrhaging of jobs cannot be ignored. A case in point is the current job-shedding at the Post Office and the obliteration of the rail system, though that is recovering.
In the face of the figurative blood on the work floor, it is in workers’ hands to ensure the election of a government that has their real interests at heart and the wherewithal to deal a death knell to growing unemployment, a sure recipe for instability. It’s time to focus on building a dream country once again, and the battlefields will include the workplace.
