SAFTU

MEDIA STATEMENT
19 AUGUST 2026
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAFTU: FALLING INFLATION IS NOT FALLING POVERTY WORKERS CANNOT EAT CPI FIGURES WHILE THE COST OF LIVING REMAINS UNAFFORDABLE

The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) notes that headline consumer inflation declined from 5.0% in June to 4.3% in July 2026.

While lower inflation is routinely presented as good economic news, SAFTU warns against confusing a lower rate of price increases with lower prices or improved living standards. Inflation falling to 4.3% does not mean that prices fell by 0.7%. In fact, consumer prices still increased by 0.2% between June and July. It simply means that prices are increasing more slowly than they were before.
Workers cannot eat CPI figures. They cannot pay electricity accounts with inflation statistics.

They cannot board taxis with favourable economic commentary.
More fundamentally, SAFTU rejects the celebration of the cooling down of an economy that is already freezing millions of people out.
South Africa does not have an overheating economy characterised by excessive employment, rapidly rising real wages and runaway consumer demand. We have an economy scarred by world-beating unemployment, mass poverty, grotesque inequality, stagnant growth and declining industrial capacity.

To celebrate weaker demand and falling inflation without confronting this reality is to celebrate the stabilisation of an economic crisis.

NEARLY HALF OF OUR LABOUR FORCE REMAINS UNDERUTILISED

The latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey exposes the contradiction.
South Africa's official unemployment rate increased from 32.7% in the first quarter to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026. There are now approximately 8.5 million officially unemployed people.

Using the expanded definition, unemployment stands at 43.8%, while the broadest measure of labour underutilisation, LU4, remains at an astonishing 46.3%. Another 4.6 million people are in the potential labour force.
Employment actually declined by approximately 16,000 during the second quarter, while the number of unemployed people increased by around 345,000.
In other words, nearly one out of every two economically active South Africans is either unemployed, underemployed or has become discouraged or otherwise marginally attached to the labour market.

What exactly are workers supposed to celebrate? Inflation has fallen to 4.3%, but official unemployment has risen to 33.6%. Lower inflation alongside rising unemployment can hardly be presented as proof of an economy working for the majority.

WORKING NO LONGER GUARANTEES ESCAPE FROM POVERTY

For those fortunate enough to have jobs, employment increasingly provides no guarantee of escaping poverty.

The current Upper-Bound Poverty Line is R2,846 per person per month. Yet the National Minimum Wage is only R30.23 per hour.
In July, a minimum-wage worker working eight hours a day for all 23 working days could earn a maximum of approximately R5,562.32 before deductions.

For a household of four, even this maximum monthly wage amounts to only about R1,391 per person less than half the Upper-Bound Poverty Line. This exposes the brutal reality of working poverty in South Africa: millions of people can work full time and still remain poor because wages are hopelessly inadequate relative to the cost of maintaining a household.

ELECTRICITY HAS RISEN BY MORE THAN 600% SINCE 2008

Electricity provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of why today's headline inflation number bears little resemblance to the accumulated cost-of-living crisis confronting workers.

Data cited by the National Agricultural Marketing Council show that the average electricity tariff increased from approximately 19.59 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2008 to about 143.50 cents by 2023 an increase of more than 600% in just 15 years.
And the increases have continued.

The Competition Commission's 2026 Cost of Living Report found that electricity prices increased by approximately 85% between 2020 and January 2026, compared with an increase of approximately 30% in overall inflation over the same period.
In other words, electricity increased at almost three times the rate of general inflation during this period.

Workers are not paying the electricity prices of 2008 simply because inflation has fallen to 4.3%. They are paying today's electricity tariffs after nearly two decades of extraordinary accumulated increases.
This is increasingly not only an electricity supply crisis. It is an electricity affordability crisis. Electricity may be available, but millions of working-class households increasingly cannot afford enough of it.

FUEL HITS WORKERS TWICE – IN THE TAXI AND AT THE SUPERMARKET

The same accumulated burden can be seen in fuel prices. Official historical fuel-price data show that inland 95-octane petrol cost approximately R7.47 per litre in January 2008. By January 2026 it was approximately R20.75 per litre, an increase of around 178%.

The volatility experienced this year has been particularly severe. In April 2026 the fuel component of the CPI increased by 18.2% in a single month, the largest monthly increase since the current CPI series began in 2008.

By May, petrol was approximately 24.8% more expensive than a year earlier, while diesel was an extraordinary 53.8% more expensive.
Recent fuel-price decreases have helped to moderate headline inflation. We welcome any reduction that gives workers relief. But a temporary decrease does not erase the enormous accumulated increase in fuel prices over the past two decades.
Fuel costs also cannot be considered separately from food prices.

South Africa's deteriorating freight rail system has made the economy increasingly dependent upon road freight. Food must travel from farms to processors, from processors to distribution centres and ultimately from distribution centres to supermarkets and shops.

Diesel therefore enters repeatedly into the food value chain. Farmers require fuel and transport; agricultural inputs must be delivered; produce must reach processors; manufactured food must reach distribution centres; and trucks must then carry it to retailers.

When diesel rises, the cost pressures are transmitted through the food supply chain.
Workers consequently suffer the fuel-price crisis twice first as commuters travelling to work and again as consumers buying food and other necessities transported by road.
This burden is particularly severe because apartheid spatial planning continues to force millions of workers to live enormous distances from economic centres and spend a disproportionate share of their wages simply getting to and from work.

TRANSPORT AND ELECTRICITY ALONE CONSUME 62.4% OF A MINIMUM-WAGE WORKER'S PAY

The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group's July 2026 Household Affordability Index exposes the brutal arithmetic confronting working-class families.
The average household food basket costs R5,530.52 per month almost the entire maximum monthly wage of R5,562.32 earned by a minimum-wage worker working every available working day in July.

PMBEJD calculates that transport to work costs approximately R2,208 per month, while prepaid electricity costs another R1,263.45.
Together, transport and electricity consume R3,471.45 — 62.4% of the worker's maximum monthly wage before a single item of food is purchased.

That worker is left with just R2,090.87 for food, rent, school expenses, healthcare, clothing, toiletries and every other household requirement.

A basic nutritious food basket for a family of four costs approximately R3,848.97. Even if every cent remaining after transport and electricity were spent exclusively on food, the household would still face an enormous shortfall. This is what the cost-of-living crisis looks like from inside a working-class household.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING WHEN WE CELEBRATE LOWER INFLATION?

SAFTU therefore asks a more fundamental question: what kind of economy is producing this lower inflation? Lower inflation is desirable. Workers, and particularly poor workers, are among the greatest victims of rising prices.

SAFTU is not advocating inflation.
But low inflation is not automatically evidence of a healthy economy. Inflation can moderate because demand is weak, households are financially exhausted, wages are suppressed, unemployment is extraordinarily high and economic growth is stagnant.

What is being celebrated as an economic achievement is, in significant part, the cooling down of an economy that is already freezing millions of people out.

The tragedy is that the medicine prescribed for inflation restrictive monetary policy, high interest rates, fiscal austerity and the suppression of aggregate demand is being administered to an economy already suffering from chronic underinvestment, deindustrialisation, poverty and mass unemployment.

Higher interest rates increase the cost of borrowing for workers and businesses, suppress household consumption, discourage productive investment and weaken employment creation.

Inflation may consequently moderate. But so too can economic activity.
For the unemployed worker, the retrenched factory worker and the household drowning in debt, this is hardly an economic victory.

SOUTH AFRICA IS BEING DEINDUSTRIALISED AND FINANCIALISED

The decline in inflation must therefore also be understood against the profound structural transformation of the South African economy.
Manufacturing once accounted for around 22% of South Africa's GDP in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its contribution has subsequently fallen to approximately 12%.
Factories have closed. Industrial capacity has been eroded. Manufacturing employment has been destroyed.

The latest developments reinforce this warning. Manufacturing contracted for a second consecutive quarter in the first quarter of 2026, while finance was among the sectors making a positive contribution to economic growth.

The Treasury's 2026 Cities Economic Outlook similarly identifies what it describes as “premature deindustrialisation” in Gauteng, reporting approximately 282,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in the province in the third quarter of 2025 than in the third quarter of 2008.

At the same time, finance and other service sectors have assumed an increasingly dominant position in the economy.
This is the contradiction of an increasingly financialised economy.

Economic success is increasingly judged through inflation expectations, bond yields, sovereign credit ratings, financial-market confidence and currency movements, while the productive economy is allowed to wither.
Financial indicators can therefore improve at precisely the same time that factories close, productive investment stagnates and workers lose their jobs.

An economy can have low inflation and still be profoundly dysfunctional. It can satisfy financial markets while failing its people.
South Africa cannot interest-rate its way to industrialisation, austerity its way to full employment or financialise its way out of poverty.

PRICE STABILITY WITHOUT JOBS CANNOT BE THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

SAFTU reiterates its opposition to the South African Reserve Bank's narrow inflation-targeting framework and to an economic policy architecture that effectively treats price stability as more important than employment and industrial development.
An economy in which almost half the labour force is underutilised does not require further cooling. It desperately requires productive investment, industrialisation, rising employment, higher wages and expanding productive capacity.

South Africa does not need the stability of the graveyard. Rather, we need an economy that produces things. We need factories and mines whose mineral wealth is beneficiated locally instead of simply exported in raw form. We need functioning railways that reduce the cost of transporting goods. We need massive public infrastructure investment and affordable electricity and public transport. Above all, we need millions of decent jobs.
Monetary, fiscal and industrial policy must therefore be coordinated around a developmental strategy based on full employment, reindustrialisation, localisation, beneficiation, public investment and decent work.

Government must rebuild manufacturing, reverse deindustrialisation, expand infrastructure investment, restore freight and passenger rail, regulate administered prices such as electricity and municipal services, strengthen affordable public transport and accelerate the insourcing of outsourced workers.

THE SABC MUST INTERROGATE, NOT CELEBRATE

SAFTU is particularly concerned by the manner in which sections of the media, including the SABC, frame declining inflation principally as good economic news.
A public broadcaster has a responsibility to interrogate official economic narratives against the lived experiences of the population.

When falling inflation is celebrated without equally examining 33.6% official unemployment, 43.8% expanded unemployment, 46.3% labour underutilisation, working poverty, electricity increases exceeding 600%, the enormous burden of transport and food, stagnant economic growth and continuing deindustrialisation, the reporting risks reproducing government's preferred economic narrative rather than subjecting it to rigorous scrutiny.

Responsible economic journalism must ask more than whether inflation has fallen.
It must ask: Are people finding jobs? Are real wages improving? Are factories opening or closing? Is manufacturing expanding or contracting? Can workers afford electricity? Can families afford nutritious food? Can workers afford to travel to work? Is poverty declining? Is inequality narrowing?
Those are the measures by which ordinary people experience an economy.

WORKERS CANNOT EAT LOWER INFLATION

The working class cannot survive on favourable macroeconomic headlines.
Workers cannot eat lower inflation.

They cannot pay electricity accounts with CPI figures, nor can they board taxis with inflation forecasts. They can neither feed their children with bond-market confidence nor find employment in a sovereign credit rating.

SAFTU therefore refuses to celebrate the cooling of an economy already characterised by world-beating unemployment, mass poverty and grotesque inequality.

We welcome lower price increases where they genuinely relieve working-class households. But price stability achieved alongside mass unemployment, depressed demand, shrinking industrial capacity and stagnant wages cannot be presented as economic success.

The ultimate test of economic policy is not whether inflation has reached a target.
It is whether people can find decent work, earn a living wage, feed their families, afford electricity and transport, access quality public services and live with dignity.

Until South Africa achieves those objectives, claims of economic success will continue to ring hollow for the millions of workers and unemployed people struggling simply to survive.

For media enquiries contact the National Spokesperson at
Newton Masuku

066 168 2157
[email protected]

Media Officer
Asive Dyani
071 901 9564

MEDIA STATEMENT
11 AUGUST 2026
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAFTU ON THE NKANENG MINE TRAGEDY: ILLEGAL MINING IS A DEADLY CONSEQUENCE OF ABANDONMENT UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE FAILURE OF THE EXTRACTIVIST MINING MODEL

The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) is deeply saddened by the deaths of at least 14 miners following the collapse of a disused mine at Nkaneng, near Rustenburg in the North West. Others have reportedly been injured, while some remained trapped as rescue operations continued.

SAFTU extends its heartfelt condolences to the families, friends, fellow workers and communities of those who have lost their lives. We hope that everyone still unaccounted for will be located safely.

This tragedy cannot simply be dismissed with the headline that “illegal miners died in an abandoned mine.”

It confirms precisely what SAFTU has repeatedly warned: South Africa has allowed thousands of abandoned, derelict and inadequately secured mines to become death traps, environmental hazards and breeding grounds for organised criminal syndicates.

WE HAVE WARNED ABOUT THIS REPEATEDLY

Following the Stilfontein tragedy, SAFTU pointed to the approximately 6,000 derelict and ownerless mines and abandoned mining sites that constitute the poisonous inheritance of more than a century of mining.

In our subsequent interventions on illegal mining, SAFTU has repeatedly warned that unregulated mining threatens not only those who descend underground but entire working-class communities through unstable ground, sinkholes, pollution, dust, violence, environmental destruction and damage to homes and infrastructure.

We have also insisted that South Africa cannot solve this crisis through policing alone.

The Nkaneng tragedy once again demonstrates the terrible human price of failing to confront the crisis comprehensively.

ABANDONED MINES MUST NOT BECOME ABANDONED RESPONSIBILITIES

For generations, mining corporations have extracted enormous wealth from beneath South African soil.

Workers descended kilometres underground and sacrificed their health and, in countless cases, their lives. Mining communities carried the social and environmental costs. Yet when particular operations were no longer sufficiently profitable, too many shafts and mining areas were abandoned without adequate rehabilitation and long-term protection.

SAFTU rejects a system in which profits are privatised while the environmental, social and human costs are socialised.

Mining corporations cannot be allowed to extract billions during profitable years and then leave workers, communities and the state with unstable shafts, contaminated land and enormous rehabilitation liabilities.

The state must identify the responsible mining companies wherever this remains possible and enforce their rehabilitation obligations. Where companies have disappeared, the state cannot simply abandon affected communities.

ILLEGAL MINING IS AN ORGANISED ECONOMIC SYSTEM

We must also stop pretending that thousands of desperately poor people simply wake up one morning and independently decide to disappear underground. There is an illegal mining economy above the ground.

There are financiers. There are recruiters. There are people supplying equipment and food. There are transport networks. There are buyers of illegally extracted minerals. There are processors and exporters. There are people laundering the proceeds, and there are organised criminal syndicates profiting from the desperation of those who physically enter these dangerous shafts.

The poorest worker underground is frequently the most visible and disposable link in a much larger economic chain. SAFTU therefore demands that law enforcement follow the money.

Arresting impoverished miners while financiers, buyers, smugglers, exporters and syndicate bosses remain untouched will never eliminate illegal mining.

MASS UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY PROVIDE AN ARMY OF DESPERATE LABOUR

SAFTU does not romanticise illegal mining.
It is unlawful. It is extraordinarily dangerous. Criminal syndicates operating in this economy must be confronted decisively. But neither will we close our eyes to the social conditions that continuously supply vulnerable workers to this industry.

South Africa’s catastrophic unemployment crisis has condemned millions of people to a life without any realistic prospect of obtaining decent employment. Across Southern Africa, unemployment, poverty and inequality create an enormous pool of desperate workers who can be recruited into extremely hazardous informal work.

Many mining communities have simultaneously experienced retrenchments, mine closures and the disappearance of formal employment. Hunger cannot be our employment agency. Desperation cannot be South Africa’s mining policy.

This is why a purely militarised or policing response will never resolve the crisis. Close one shaft without addressing unemployment, poverty and the illegal mineral supply chain, and desperate workers will simply be driven towards another.

DO NOT TURN THIS TRAGEDY INTO XENOPHOBIA

SAFTU equally warns against attempts to exploit illegal mining to promote xenophobia and Afrophobia.

Where foreign nationals are undocumented, immigration law must be enforced by the responsible state institutions. Where anyone commits a crime, irrespective of nationality, that person must face the law.

But nationality does not explain why thousands of abandoned mining sites exist.

Nationality does not explain why shafts remain accessible.Nationality does not explain why criminal syndicates flourish.And nationality certainly does not explain who purchases, processes and profits from illegally extracted minerals.Crime has no nationality. Poverty has no nationality. Exploitation has no nationality.

Turning poor South Africans against poor workers from neighbouring African countries merely diverts attention away from those making fortunes from this illegal economy and from the structural failures that created it.

END THE EXTRACTIVIST MODEL PEOPLE MUST OWN AND BENEFIT FROM OUR MINERAL WEALTH

But securing abandoned shafts and arresting criminal syndicates, while necessary, will not resolve the fundamental contradiction at the heart of South African mining.

For more than a century, South Africa has operated an extractivist mining model inherited from colonialism and apartheid: dig our finite mineral resources out of the ground, export them largely in raw or insufficiently beneficiated form, allow corporations and their shareholders to accumulate enormous wealth, and leave workers and mining communities carrying the burden of occupational disease, unemployment, environmental destruction and abandoned mines.

The tragedy at Nkaneng is therefore also an indictment of this economic model.

SAFTU reiterates the historic demand contained in the Freedom Charter:

“The mineral wealth beneath the soil… shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.”

SAFTU’s founding Congress reaffirmed this demand. We continue to demand the nationalisation of the mines and strategic mineral resources under democratic worker and community control.

We are not calling for nationalisation merely to replace private corporate executives with unaccountable state bureaucrats while workers and communities remain spectators.

We demand democratic public ownership, with workers and mining communities exercising meaningful control and with management subjected to rigorous public accountability.

Nationalisation must form part of a democratically planned programme of beneficiation, industrialisation and reindustrialisation.

South Africa cannot continue digging platinum, chrome, manganese, iron ore and other strategic minerals from beneath our soil, exporting too much of their value in raw or insufficiently processed form, and then importing expensive manufactured products produced using these very resources.

When we export our minerals without sufficient beneficiation, we export jobs.

We demand an end to this extractivist model.

Our mineral wealth must become one of the foundations for rebuilding South African manufacturing. We must beneficiate our resources domestically, develop downstream industries, rebuild our steel, engineering and manufacturing capacity, manufacture components and finished products locally, and create hundreds of thousands of decent jobs throughout the mineral value chain.

This is also part of the structural answer to illegal mining.

Instead of abandoned shafts, devastated communities and unemployed former mineworkers, South Africa should have a publicly owned and democratically planned mining sector integrated into a comprehensive industrial strategy that creates employment, develops mining communities, rehabilitates the environment and ensures that mineral wealth benefits present and future generations.

The choice could not be clearer:

We can continue with extractivism dig, export, retrench, abandon and leave communities with the ruins or we can nationalise our mineral wealth, beneficiate it, industrialise our economy and use it to create decent jobs and transform the lives of our people.

SAFTU DEMANDS URGENT ACTION

SAFTU calls for a coordinated national programme involving government, organised labour and affected mining communities to:

1. Immediately audit, secure, seal and rehabilitate dangerous abandoned mines and shafts, prioritising those threatening surrounding communities.

2. Identify former mine owners and enforce their rehabilitation obligations, including recovering rehabilitation funds wherever legally possible.

3. Investigate the entire illegal-mining value chain financiers, recruiters, buyers, processors, transporters, exporters and organised syndicates instead of concentrating enforcement on impoverished workers underground.

4. Protect mining communities from violence, intimidation, environmental destruction, pollution and dangerous ground instability.

5. Develop a properly regulated artisanal and small-scale mining framework, allowing legitimate small miners to operate legally under enforceable health, safety, labour and environmental standards.

6. Launch a massive publicly funded programme to rehabilitate abandoned and derelict mines, employing unemployed workers and former mineworkers at decent wages while restoring devastated mining communities.

7. Hold mining corporations accountable for the entire life cycle of mining, from extraction to closure and rehabilitation.

8. Nationalise the mines and strategic mineral resources under democratic worker and community control, consistent with the Freedom Charter’s demand that the mineral wealth beneath our soil belongs to the people.

9. End the extractivist economic model and implement a comprehensive beneficiation strategy, ensuring that substantially more of our mineral wealth is processed domestically.

10. Use our mineral resources as the foundation of an ambitious programme of industrialisation and reindustrialisation, rebuilding manufacturing and creating decent, sustainable employment.

The Nkaneng disaster must become another turning point, not simply another statistic.

Every death underground should force South Africa to confront a fundamental question:

How can a country endowed with extraordinary mineral wealth continue producing enormous fortunes at one end of the mining value chain while producing abandoned communities, dangerous shafts, unemployment, desperate workers and death at the other?

South Africa’s mineral wealth belongs to its people. It must not remain merely a commodity through which corporations accumulate profits before abandoning workers, communities and exhausted mines.

In accordance with the Freedom Charter, SAFTU demands the nationalisation of the mines under democratic worker and community control; an end to the extractivist economic model; comprehensive beneficiation of our mineral resources; and a state-led programme of industrialisation and reindustrialisation.

Our mineral wealth must create decent jobs, build industries, develop communities and leave behind rehabilitated land not ghost towns, poisoned environments and abandoned shafts that become graves for desperate workers.

For media enquiries contact the National Spokesperson at
Newton Masuku

066 168 2157
[email protected]

Media Officer
Asive Dyani
071 901 9564

MEDIA STATEMENT
19 AUGUST 2026
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAFTU PLEDGES ITS FULL SOLIDARITY WITH FAWU SUGAR WORKERS AS THEY RESUME THEIR STRIKE FOR A LIVING WAGE AND DIGNITY

The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) expresses its unwavering and militant solidarity with its affiliate, the Food and Allied Workers' Union (FAWU), and thousands of sugar workers who have resumed protected strike action in the sugar manufacturing and refining industry following the collapse of wage negotiations.

Besides the question of wages and benefits, the strike is about whether the workers who produce the wealth of the sugar industry will continue to shoulder the burden of an economic crisis they did not create while employers seek to protect profits at their expense.

SAFTU fully endorses FAWU's demands for a 13% across-the-board wage increase, a R1,000 monthly transport allowance, a R1,500 monthly housing allowance, a 40% increase in the employer's medical aid contribution, a 20-hour standby allowance, and the implementation of the wage agreement from 1 April 2026. These are not extravagant demands. They are reasonable demands rooted in the daily realities confronting working-class families whose wages are increasingly consumed by rising transport costs, unaffordable housing, escalating healthcare costs and the relentless increase in the cost of living.

By contrast, the Sugar Manufacturing and Refining Employers' Association (SMREA) has offered a mere 5.4% wage increase, while attempting to present an additional 0.6% as though it were part of the current offer, despite making it conditional upon a future government decision regarding tariff protection. FAWU is entirely correct to reject this attempt to shift regulatory risk onto workers. Workers cannot pay rent, buy food or settle electricity bills with promises contingent on decisions over which they have no control.

Their expenses are immediate and unconditional; their wages must be the same.
The strike takes place against the backdrop of one of the worst cost-of-living crises in democratic South Africa. Inflation may have moderated, but workers continue to confront relentless increases in electricity tariffs, transport costs, municipal charges, food prices and housing expenses. Millions of workers remain trapped in working poverty despite being employed full-time, while nearly half of the country's labour force remains unemployed, underemployed or discouraged from seeking work. Employers cannot expect workers to absorb these mounting costs through wage restraint while expecting them to maintain productivity and support their families.

SAFTU rejects the narrative that workers must once again sacrifice because the industry faces economic challenges. Workers did not create the structural problems confronting the sugar sector. They did not determine trade policy, import controls, energy prices or industrial strategy. Yet whenever industries encounter difficulties, it is workers who are expected to accept lower wage increases, reduced benefits and declining living standards.

When profitability returns, however, workers are seldom invited to share proportionately in the rewards. This is the fundamental injustice at the heart of South Africa's economy: profits remain private while hardship is socialised onto workers and their families.

SAFTU has consistently argued that South Africa's industrial policy must protect both industries and workers. The Federation therefore supports FAWU's call for government to intervene decisively to defend the local sugar industry against unfair import competition and deindustrialisation.

However, industrial support cannot become a subsidy for employers while workers continue to experience stagnant wages and deteriorating working conditions. Any tariff protection, industrial incentives or state assistance provided to the sugar industry must be linked to binding commitments on decent wages, job security, improved working conditions, investment in productive capacity and the protection of employment. Public resources cannot continue to socialise corporate risk while allowing private companies to privatise the benefits.

The struggle of sugar workers is inseparable from the broader struggle confronting workers across South Africa. In every sector, workers are being told to moderate their demands while executive remuneration, shareholder returns and corporate profits remain protected. They are confronting outsourcing, casualisation, labour broking, retrenchments and declining purchasing power while being expected to carry the burden of an economic crisis not of their making. The sugar strike therefore represents more than a sectoral dispute; it is part of the broader struggle for economic justice, decent work and the redistribution of the wealth that workers themselves create.

SAFTU commends FAWU for remaining committed to genuine and meaningful collective bargaining. It is employers not workers who have forced this dispute to the point of industrial action by refusing to table an offer that recognises the realities confronting working-class households. Collective bargaining cannot become a ritual through which workers are repeatedly instructed to lower their expectations while employers remain unwilling to substantially improve their mandates.

The Federation therefore calls upon the Sugar Manufacturing and Refining Employers' Association to return to the negotiating table with a significantly improved mandate that addresses the legitimate concerns of workers. A negotiated settlement remains the preferred outcome, but meaningful negotiations require meaningful movement from employers.

SAFTU further calls upon the broader trade union movement, progressive organisations, community formations and all defenders of workers' rights to rally behind FAWU members in the sugar industry. An attack on the living standards of sugar workers is an attack on the entire working class. Their struggle is our struggle.

To the striking workers, SAFTU says: remain united, disciplined and resolute. Your determination strengthens the struggle of workers across every sector of our economy. The Federation stands firmly alongside you until justice is achieved.

For media enquiries contact the National Spokesperson at
Newton Masuku

066 168 2157
[email protected]

Media Officer
Asive Dyani
071 901 9564