SACP supports mineworkers strike for their share of value added in production

NUM Press Statement, 27 October 2015

SACP supports mineworkers strike for their share of value added in production

The South African Communist Party (SACP) expresses its message of working class solidarity with workers, the majority of whom being members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) who have been on a strike action at ASA Dilokong mine near Burgersfort in Limpopo. The workers have been underground for about five days and came out in the early hours of this morning. According to the local leadership of the NUM, the company did not even bother to implement health and safety procedures, including routine medical examination, when the workers came out of the underground this morning.

The workers have embarked on the underground strike action in protest against what the NUM characterised as ASA Dilokong mine’s union bashing agenda. They are also demanding that the company commit date to declare Employee Share Ownership Programme. The mineral resources of our country belong to, and the state serves as the custodian on behalf of, all the people. It is the workers, however, who add value to the minerals during production. Their demand is therefore legitimate. It is essentially about rolling back the regime of capitalist exploitation in terms of which the exploiters alone appropriate that entire value, whose fully developed shape is in the form of money, and make it their private wealth!

It is also unacceptable that the mines in that area and commercial farmers alone enjoy the lion’s share of other resources such as water to which local communities do not have access and are languishing in high levels of unemployment and poverty. The SACP is calling on its structures and members to support the strike by the workers as it unfolds and to link it with community struggles for water, employment and beneficiation to develop industrial production as well as the area.

The National Union of Mineworkers
7 Rissik Street.
Cnr Frederick Johannesburg
Tel: 011 377 2111 Cell: 083 809 3257
Twitter: @Num_Media

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/NUM/100860023402167