CHANGING WORLD
Unions face extinction as the world of work marches on
Cosatu's first woman president, Zingiswa Losi, is applying her mind to the challenges facing trade unions and stale trade union politics
The relevance of the trade union movement is the singular challenge that keeps Congress of SA Trade Unions’ (Cosatu’s) first woman president , Zingiswa Losi awake at night. Losi is no ordinary Cosatu president and her election in September marks a refreshing shift from the stale trade union politics that has come to characterise the federation in the past few decades. Interviewing presidents of the past was akin to taking a step back in time. With rhetoric heavily steeped in oft outdated ideology. This while their members, the workers, buckled under the weight of retrenchments brought about by mechanisation and large-scale deindustrialisation as the world moved on to knowledge-based economies. Losi, however, has her finger on the pulse of the changes the world and her constituency is facing. It is about time too — the government’s labour department has witnessed a worrying rise in the number of trade unions in the country. Not necessarily because the size of the labour market was in...
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