NALSU Labour Studies Podcast and YouTube video: Mametlwe Sebei: "Losing or Using the Crisis? Critical Reflections on South African Labour in the Great Lockdown”

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Mametlwe Sebei
Mametlwe Sebei

In this Labour Studies Podcast (also available as a YouTube Video), Mametlwe Sebei speaks on "Losing or Using the Crisis? Critical Reflections on South African Labour in the Great Lockdown”

The podcast and video are provided by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), Rhodes University, South Africa.

Please follow the link for the podcast: https://anchor.fm/nalsu

(You can also download the Anchor FM app for your phone at the Google Play Store).  

Please follow the link to the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) YouTube Channel for the video: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNhxCDqcwK1W7f-vro947FQ

This recorded webinar, available as both podcast and video, is from our series on "COVID-19 and the Working-Class Movement in South Africa." The IMF called 2020's "Great Lockdown" the greatest economic calamity in a century. But this is not a traditional capitalist depression, nor the start of the crisis situation:  South Africa’s unemployment had topped an unprecedented 10 million in 2019, amidst economic turmoil and a looming fiscal crisis. Lockdown shone pitiless light on existing inequalities of power and wealth. Parliament closed for months, largely unnoticed; big business and politicians sat out lockdown in rich neighbourhoods. Those most affected were already knee-deep in poverty, low wages and precarious work. Faced with the risk of social explosions, the state provided emergency social assistance on a scale unmatched in the African continent -- but this stumbled with corruption, maladministration and funding gaps. How have workers’ movements, including unions, responded to the situation facing the broad working-class? Unions represent almost 30% of the workforce, one of the highest densities worldwide, but can they cope? What new opportunities have emerged? What has been done, and what needs doing, if we are to move forward?

SPEAKER: Mametlwe Sebei is President of the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA), member of the National Executive Committee of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), and the Workers and Socialist Party. Active in the working-class movement for decades, he was formerly the National President of the Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania (PASMA), and Deputy President of the SRC at the University of Pretoria

This talk was originally given on 23 September 2020. We cover "labour studies" in the broadest sense: labour and left history,  policy and political economy, unions and popular struggles. NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Economics, History and Sociology,  it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture. https://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu/