Media Release 24th August 2010
POPCRU deplores the unlettered shooting of workers on a Legal National Strike by the police POPCRU has noted the continuation by South African Police Service and Metro Police to injure the rights of the striking workers on our second week of a legal strike against slave wages. The South African Constitution states, in the Bill of Rights [Chapter 2, Section 17] that “everyone has a right,paecefully and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket and to present petetions”.What we are experiencing is actually a real state brutality against our own brothers and sisters on a strike protected in terms of Section 64(1)(a) of the Labour Relations Act that “every employee has a right to strike and the issue in dispute must have been referred to a Council as required respectively”. Our contention is that all has been applied in terms of the law, but we continue to see police officers provoking workers at the picket line. All police officers were seen live at the affected picket lines, on television and in all newspapers hitting, arresting and shooting peaceful marchers are actually allowing themselves to be used as buffer zones on a clear wage dispute, in which the employer is intransigent to resolve. Such tendencies cannot be allowed to rubbish the tenacious pieces of legislature we have in this country such as Regulation of Gathering Act No.205 0f 1993 [as commenced in 1996] We are therefore calling on all our membership to defy the improper instructions from their commanders, which are meant to injure the good cause we are fighting for in the current conjuncture. The right to demonstrate is, at best, a qualified right. We cannot allow ignorance of provision of RGA by whosoever across all our Provinces and we call upon SAPU, SAMWU as other formations organizing in the Criminal Justice to take similar stances to condemn what we are experiencing. Usage of batons, rubber bullets, arbitrary detention, water cannons and other intimidatory methods employed by the State will never demobilize workers on genuine demands. We have nothing to lose but the chains that bind us! For more information contact POPCRU President –Cde Zizamele Cebekhulu 0825573958 POPCRU General Secretary- Cde Nkosinathi Theledi 0825677803 POPCRU Deputy General Secretary-Cde Lebogang Phepheng 0823728968 Issued by: Norman Mampane National Spokesperson Tel: 0112424600/4615 Cell: 0720737959 Fax: 0866253054 Email: [email protected] 01 Marie Road Auckland Park 2006 -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
