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News & Views by Terry Bell
Browsing All Posts filed under »Inside Labour Column«
Union move to save SA steel industry
South Africa's metalworkers' union invesment company is making moves to obtain a major stake in the local steel sector as part of a strategy to halt “continuing de-industrialisation” in the coal and iron ore rich country.
SA Bill of Rights and the 2014 election
February 22, 2013
The 2014 election campaign in South Africa has clearly begun and promises to be long and almost certainly very bitter and at the core of the ongoing debate will be the Constitution and, specifically, the Bill of Rights.
Groping towards the future
February 14, 2013
In stygian depths 4km and more below the surface of the earth gold continues to be harvested, but by fewer miners and with the aid of more — and increasingly efficient — mechanisation. The primary unemployment problem is not a question of skills or the lack of them: it is just that there are fewer and fewer jobs and more and more people wanting — and needing — work.
Early ANC election salvoes backfire
February 8, 2013
South Africa's governing ANC has loosed off the first major salvoes of the 2014 election campaign — and all of them have backfired, largely because of the confusing balancing act of trying to keep its trade union ally, Cosatu on board while pursuing policies the unions bitterly oppose.
Unions: a need to get back to first principles
February 4, 2013
Forty years ago the modern union moveent in SA was born. Then the demands, including pay and conditions, amounted to one word: democracy. But a democracy that went well beyond the veneer of electoral politics, of the legalistic notion of rich and poor being equal.
Playing politics while the fires rage
January 18, 2013
Responsibility for creating the conditions that have now, sometimes literally, set the Boland ablaze should be shared to a large degree by the dismissive attitudes of provincial and national government, the mainstream trade unions and the reactionary farming lobby. As a result, the tinder and the makings for what has turned out to be a quite major conflagration have been in place for years.
Failing the children of the poor
January 15, 2013
South Africa continues to fail the children of the poor and is once again reaping the results of that failure. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recurrent violent eruptions in the fruit and wine farm regions of the Western Cape.
The road from 1996 to Mangaung
December 13, 2012
The tortuous road to the governing ANC’s centennial conference at Mangaung ends next week. And, not to put too fine a point on it, much of the country is gatvol with the route it has taken and where it has arrived.
Terry Bell Writes 
March 3, 2013
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