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News & Views by Terry Bell
What solution to a world in crisis?
September 3, 2015
The most important lesson to learn: The very developments that are starting to make most of humanity redundant, causing horrendous suffering and social and economic dislocation around the world could become the means to collective — and truly democratic — decision making.
Posted in: Inside Labour Column
Mining, job losses & the system
August 15, 2015
Large scale redundancies in the South African mining sector, running to tens of thousands of jobs, are probably inevitable. But only because of the system in which we have to operate. Even in the gold sector, there will be mines and shafts that remain profitable without job losses, but each shaft and each mine will […]
Posted in: Inside Labour Column
Alex La Guma comes home
August 9, 2015
“Alex La Guma has come home.” With those words, a visibly emotional Blanche La Guma last month received the first book, “hot off the presses” containing three of her late husband’s best-known novels, all of them banned in the apartheid era. The occasion was the initial launch of Alex La Guma – A colossus revisited […]
Posted in: Book Reviews
Playing games with women’s rights
August 9, 2015
Every year as August dawns there is an annual media ritual in South Africa about women’s rights and, on August 9, national Women's Day, a positive rash of declarations. But this year there was great irony in the media murmurings about national “Women’s Month” being eclipsed by news of the awarding of the 2022 winter Olympics to Beijing. And not only because China has a hardly sterling record for human as well as women’s rights.
Posted in: Inside Labour Column
Unity, cohesion and a pink flag
July 25, 2015
A façade of unity and cohesion continues to be promoted by Cosatu and, even more interestingly, by the SA Communist Party that is itself under pressure break from the ANC-led alliance. This pressure comes members who believe that party offers a radical alternative. But perhaps the SACP's red flag is now just "palest pink".
Posted in: Inside Labour Column
A case of confusion, contradiction & irony
July 21, 2015
Behind a very flimsy screen of unity and cohesion promoted last week by Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini, the divisions in the country’s largest labour federation have become even greater. And, amid a welter of contradiction and debates about constitutionality, it is not surprising that so much confusion reigns.
Posted in: Inside Labour Column
Terry Bell Writes 
The sex industry debate in SA
September 4, 2015
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Is commercialised sex a crime? Or should only those who sell their services be free of criminal prosecution while those who patronise them or who benefit in any way financially, remain guilty of a crime? Alternatively, should commercial sex be regarded as work, be decriminalised, and be subject to broadly the same labour legislation as any other legitimate means of earning a living.?