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NALSU NEWS: Professor Lucien van der Walt of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit was on eNCA for May Day 2025.
He said that unions in South Africa previously swam against the global tide, growing and winning major gains. Today, they are fragmented, retreating, and members are often demobilised. Vast sectors of the working-class are low-waged, insecure, or unemployed. The state has failed to solve the jobs crisis, providing bad education, collapsing infrastructure, indecision, corruption and incompetence – its focus is on expensive but easy wins like grants and government wages. Rather than relying on politicians and promises, or living forever on R350 grants, working-class people can exert pressure from below for mass job creation through sustained reindustrialisation.
Much more in the video:
https://www.enca.com/videos/
ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned, and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour, and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, 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.