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News & Views by Terry Bell
Browsing All Posts published on »October, 2010«
A POLITICAL TSUNAMI AND ITS AFTERMATH (08.05.2008)
A tsunami is a dangerous and almost entirely destructive event, a wave that sweeps all before it, damaging and destroying. Which is why it seemed unfortunate that Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi chose, before the last Cosatu congress, to refer to the the growing groundswell of support for the country’s then sacked deputy president, Jacob […]
SIGNIFICANT MAY DAY FOR SWAZILAND (24.04.2008)
October 2, 2010
As May Day 2008 looms, the army of the working poor and the legions of the unemployed are being force marched to still greater hardship. Nowhere more so than in Africa’s last feudal monarchy, Swaziland, which is impacted directly by rising inflation in South Africa..
PLAYING THE BLAME GAME (17.04.2008)
October 2, 2010
The government and the Eskom bosses screwed up. Therefore we, the consumers, have to pay and the country as a whole — besides those with private generators — will have to suffer. Now, to add insult to injury, the army of the working poor have been told to turn themselves into micro farmers. “Feed yourselves,” […]
GETTING TO THE ROOTS OF CRISIS (10.04.2008)
October 2, 2010
One of the great problems with the politics of protest is that it all too often targets the symptoms of an ill rather than the cause. In other words, much protest aims to prune the possibly poisonous twigs and branches of a noxious plant, without getting to the stem, let alone the root. This is […]
THE PUBLIC PAYS FOR POWER BLUNDERS (03.04.2008)
October 2, 2010
The blundering mismanagement and incompetence of Eskom management and the government have together caused the current energy crisis which consumers are now expected to pay for via massive tariff increases. Yet, at the same time, this situation has ironically highlighted another factor: that a state-owned utility can efficiently produce the cheapest possible electricity. For, as […]
SCARE STORIES AND POWER PRICES (27.03.2008)
October 2, 2010
Public enterprises minister Alex Erwin jumped the gun with his “scare stories” of electricity price increases. And, in the process, he has lost whatever residual confidence the trade unions had in him. Not that there was much left. “Ever since he cried sabotage to justify the power outages in 2006, instead of the negligence and […]
DEFINING UNIONS AND AWAITING TRANSFORMATION (13.03.2008)
October 2, 2010
Cosatu is not a socialist party or organisation. It is a trade union federation; an organisation of workers fighting for and protecting the interests of workers. That point was highlighted this week by Gwede Mantashe, former National Union of Mineworkers general secretary and now secretary-general of the ANC and national chair of the SA Communist […]
SA PUBLIC SECTOR DISPUTE RUMBLES ON (06.03.2008)
October 2, 2010
The massive public sector dispute last year did not end with the calling off of the strike in June. It has continued to rumble on in a series of negotiations with teacher unions — and now there is the prospect that the public sector unions will make another set of double digit pay demands by […]
Terry Bell Writes 
October 2, 2010
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