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News & Views by Terry Bell
Browsing All Posts filed under »Inside Labour Column«
Post Covid-19: why we don’t need ‘normal’
There seems to be a consensus that the world will not be the same again in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, But while business and the elites plan for a possible return to business as usual, this appears to be te last thing we need since the 'normal' we had was precisely the problem.
A Covid-19 wake up call for fairness
March 22, 2020
The spread around the world of Covid-19 by jet set and cruise travellers has heightened the fear of the horrendous human cost that this virus — no respecter of class, caste or colour — could cause should it reach the teeming favelas, squatter camps and shacklands of the working class poor. This should bring to the fore the gross neglect of the poor, many of whom continue to live — and die — as a result of treatable and curable epidemics such as tuberculosis (TB).
Middle class is not defined by income alone
March 11, 2020
Beware the anger of those individual workers, who finding themselves jobless, realise they were conned into believing that they had ascended to middle class status and supposedly shared greater interests with the owners of capital than with the other sellers of labour, the working class majority.
Declarations of war & pie in the sky
February 28, 2020
South African finance minister Tito Mboweni's 2020 Budget was a classic example of pie in the sky and it therefore — and unsurprisingly — triggered declarations of war from the labour movement. The only fulsome support seems to have come from from those at the top of the financial pile.
The potentially explosive reality of joblessness
February 19, 2020
While some commentators clutch at straws of optimism, citing unchanged quarterly unemployment statistics, the reality is that what exists is not just a crisis, it is a tragedy of massive proportions with socially explosive potential.
Statistical facts and reality
February 18, 2020
It is necessary to look behind the bald unemployment statistics to discover the truly frightening reality. An "official" rate of joblessness at 29.1% if far fromn the more accurate "expanded" figure of 38.7%. And even that does not reflect the true measure of unemployment in South Africa.
The green irony at Davos
January 31, 2020
It is ironic that the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum has announced that the “transition to a greener and more equal economy is not just possible but imperative for restoring productivity”. Because the members of this private rich boys' club, representatives of the 1% who comprise the apex of the global wealth pyramid, are primarily responsible for the crisis: they are part of the problem, not the solution.
Strap in — it’s the rise of the machines
January 21, 2020
Artificial Intelligence and the technology employing it is not our enemy; it is who controls it and to what end that will determine whether humanity benefits or finds itself in the sort of dystopian world only imagine4d by the most pessimistic speculative fiction writers. The technology now being developed, displaces human labour; it does not (as in previous industrial revolutions) provide machines that make human labour more productive. It has never been more imperative for working people to take democratic control and perhaop liuberate humanity.
Terry Bell Writes 
April 4, 2020
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