(From Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU))
NALSU News: Professor Lucien van der Walt of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit was on eNCA for May Day 2025, which you can see HERE on the original page.
Summary (but much more in the video): Unions in South Africa previously swam against the global tide, growing and winning major gains. Today, they’re fragmented, retreating, and members are often demobilised. Vast sectors of the working-class are low-waged, insecure, or unemployed. The state has ailed 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 rely on politicians and promises, or live forever on R350 grants, working-class people can exert pressure from below for mass job creation through sustained reindustrialisation.
(NALSU, at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research, and workers’ education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned, pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour, and research organisations).
Lucien van der Walt 