COSATU Call Center Number 010 002 2590

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has recently launched a new call center to provide much-needed assistance to workers facing labour-related challenges. This dedicated resource aims to offer support, information, and guidance to both members of COSATU-affiliated unions and unorganized workers, ensuring that they have a place to turn for help with workplace issues.

COSATU June 16 Statement

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)’s Young Workers’ Forum is honouring this historic day with COSATU’s affiliate unions across the provinces.  COSATU’s Young Workers’ Forums commemorates this day under the theme “Working together towards Youth Development through action”.

16 June 1976 marked the moment when a generation of courageous youth in Soweto and townships across the nation rebelled against the apartheid regime and its oppressive education policies.  Their sacrifices changed the course of South Africa’s history for the better.  This signalled an entry en masse of the youth into the mass democratic movement that continues to today in the form of the Progressive Youth Alliance and its formations including SASCO and COSAS.

Young people are not immune from the challenges facing the working class.  Youth unemployment remains above 60%.  Young people in particular young women are at risk to gender-based violence and sexual harassment at the workplace.  If we are to turn South Africa around, then we need to ensure that we invest in young workers and place youth empowerment and employment at the centre of our developmental agenda.

COSATU and its Young Workers’ Forum call upon government, education institutions and the private sector to act decisively to:

  • Ensure that our schools are well resourced, teaching vacancies are filled, the infrastructure backlog addressed and security ensured so that our schools are places of learning.
  • Resolve the administrative and funding challenges undermining the progressive mandate of NSFAS and that its resource are expanded so that all qualifying working class students are able to access tertiary education.
  • Expand internship and artisanship programmes as well as the Presidential Employment and Youth Employment programmes in both the public and private sector to afford young people the chance to enter the labour market, earn a salary and acquire the necessary skills and experience to find permanent jobs.
  • Extend the National Youth Development Agency’s mandate and programmes, in particular those that support youth entrepreneurship.  This may need to include consolidating duplicate programmes.
  • Make financing from state and commercial banks, including the Land Bank, more accessible for young people seeking to establish their own businesses.
  • Fill all vacancies in the public sector, in particular addressing the crisis of unemployed graduates whose skills are badly needed by the state.

Issued by COSATU.

For further information contact:

COSATU Young Workers’ Forum National Secretary Msiyoyo Siyabonga Mkhize

0747936738/ 0359024639

smkhize@num.org.za