Cosatu Threatens To Bring Country To Standstill So Business As Usual Then
PRETORIA. Trade union federation Cosatu has promised that today’s strike will “bring South Africa to a complete standstill” but experts say a complete standstill is business as usual in most of the country’s provinces where city managers are struggling to deal with staff seeking 1.3 million years of compassionate leave for the funerals of 2.6 billion grandparents.
Cosatu spokesman Jobsworth Ntini said that a massive strike was the only way to highlight the grievances of the working masses. Asked what these grievances were he said he was “not totally clear because someone left the memo in the cubbyhole of Zwelinzima’s Beemer” but he believed they included “high food prices expensive fuel all the rain we’ve been having and the rumoured axing of the Oprah show on SABC3″.
However he said the strike’s main objective would be to “eliminate at least temporarily i.e. this week the tyranny of the fiveday working week”.
“We want the united socialist masses to know that some of our cadres are still being oppressed into working a full five days in a row mark you sometimes starting their shifts as early as 9am and being flogged by the scourges of capitalism for up to eight hours.
“A little less if they have to catch a taxi at 4.”
However labour experts and economists say the strike will have no effect on a public service that has been completely immobile for almost a decade.
According to Cheesecake Masimola the head of Zombywatch an NGO that monitors the performance of public service employees up to 5 percent of all civil servants are clinically dead.
“That number rises to about 15 percent if you’re looking at somewhere like the Department of Home Affairs or the Ministry of Education” said Masimola.
“Most people who wait in queues at Home Affairs are too polite to ask why the clerk in Window 5 hasn’t moved in forty minutes.
“It’s because he died in 2006 and has become desiccated in the nosebleeddry atmosphere of those prefab offices they use.”
He added however that death and natural embalming processes were not always to blame for complete immobility in government offices.
“Some of them are dead yes but many of them are just what we in the industry call ‘lazy’.”
Meanwhile the Eastern Cape has vowed to shake off its image as a safehaven for politically appointed incompetent rubes by launching an awareness campaign called “Let’s do what we’re paid for!”
According to a spokesman from the province’s Department of Labour local government officials were “very excited” about the campaign and fully intended to read all about it when they got back from lunch next week.
“It’s a really dynamic rethink of current labour ideologies” said the spokesman. “Basically our thinking was: if you can’t open the box because you can’t find the instruction manual you’ve got to think outside the box.
“So in a nutshell we’re challenging staff to think about their work in a new way we’re calling ‘competence’.
“Don’t put it on top of the filing cabinet try to put it inside the filing cabinet. Even better try to put it near the right letter in the alphabet.
“Instead of eating your fish and chips on that original docket why not make a photocopy and eat off that?
“How about reading the safety declaration before you sign it?
“We’re hoping our workers will discover how good it feels to be basically competent.”
Asked when the workers were going to be trained in the new system he said “Now now or maybe later. But probably just now.
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