The South African workforce is composed of all the people who are either working or available to work and are actively seeking work. Not everyone of working age participates in the work force. In South Africa the overall percentage of the working age population that participates in the work force is about 62%.
Issa Saunders
News | 13 March 2013
It was International Women’s Day (IWD) on Friday. And it seemed an appropriate
time for a reminder about the labour movement origins of the day and of its noble
aims and egalitarian promise. This because several recent studies reveal that the
female half of humanity is once again bearing the brunt of the global economic crisis.
After all, when it began in 1910, IWD was rich with the promise of equality.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 13 March 2013
GroundUp sat down with Ingrid Woolard, Associate Professor in Economics at UCT and chair of the Employment Conditions Commission to talk about what goes into setting the minimum wage.
Kezia Lilenstein
News | 13 March 2013
Cancellation of a planned march by the farmworkers coalition against alleged intimidation by farmers has led to claims that the City of Cape Town is complicit in undermining the new R105 minimum wage.
Benjamin Fogel and Jeanne Hefez
News | 6 March 2013
The 2014 election campaign has clearly begun and promises to be long and almost
certainly very bitter. Labour relations — and relations with labour — are likely to be
in the forefront, with Cosatu, as a member of the governing tripartite allliance, in the
thick of it.
Opinion | 27 February 2013
During my lunch break on 26 February 2013, I walked past a worker, resting in his wheelbarrow with a bottle of Coca Cola in his hand, beneath a sign that reads, “Stock wanted”.
Gregory Solik
News | 27 February 2013
In stygian depths 4km and more below the surface of the earth gold continues to be
harvested, but by fewer miners and with the aid of more—and increasingly efficient—mechanisation.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 20 February 2013
This is a debate between Professors Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings and the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU).
GroundUp Staff
News | 14 February 2013
Workers in Kwazulu-Natal clothing factories have made allegations of abuse against factory owners in affidavits provided to GroundUp.
Issa Saunders
News | 13 February 2013
In and around Colesberg, a small historical town on the N1 mid-way between Cape Town and Johannesburg, I met a group of impoverished sheep shearers living in abject poverty, surviving in tiny tin shacks on the verges of public roads. Only recently, in the last 15 years, have they become a settled, sedentary people.
Timothy Gabb
News | 6 February 2013
Eight years ago Bongani Ndlazi started collecting old bicycles and making them new again. He has turned his talent into a business that puts food on the table.
Nokubonga Yawa
News | 6 February 2013
Yesterday, exactly 40 years ago, the modern trade union movement arrived on the
South African scene. Its birth was heralded by a wave of strikes in Durban that had
gestated over 22 days from the time 2,000 workers at Coronation Brick and Tile
downed tools.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 5 February 2013
Hundreds of farmworkers in the De Doorns area have been fired after the end of the farmworkers strike in the area on 22 January. The strike had been called off by COSATU the week before, but the seemingly dominant union in the area, the Bawsi Agriculture Workers Union of South Africa (Bawusa), suspended the strike days later. Clashes between police and protesters resulted in at least one death, many injuries and 181 arrests of striking farmworkers.
Ben Fogel
Opinion | 30 January 2013
Farm workers began the centennial year of the 1913 Land Act with a continuation of the most militant industrial action in the sector in decades. On January 9th, various Western Cape farming towns were turned into warzones as protestors demanding an increase to a minimum R150 per day for farm workers, blockaded highways and set vineyards alight with police using rubber bullets and tear gas.
Niall Reddy
News | 24 January 2013
GroundUp journalist Mihle Pike received a call this morning that employees at Cash Paymaster Services had gone on strike. She went to see what was going on. Here is her account.
Mihle Pike
News | 23 January 2013
South Africa has continued to fail the children of the poor and is once again reaping
the results of that failure. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recurrent violent
eruptions in the fruit and wine farm regions of the Western Cape.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 16 January 2013