Articles for Terry Bell
Playing games with the rights of women
Every year as August dawns there is a media ritual about women’s rights and, on August 9, a positive rash of declarations of intent and remembrances about the 1956 anti-pass march of the women on Union Buildings. But while institutionalised apartheid has gone, the position of women in South Africa and around the world remains demonstrably unequal and, in some cases is worse now than it was 20 or more years ago.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 11 August 2015
SACP’s flag is palest pink
Unity and cohesion remain the slogans for the ANC-led alliance as the three partners echo the claim of last week’s Cosatu special national congress that such togetherness has been assured. It hasn’t. But, with the infighting having gone overwhelmingly in favour of the executive, there are hurried attempts to create a facade of unity as the lobbying continues.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 27 July 2015
COSATU still divided after national congress
Behind a very flimsy screen of unity and cohesion promoted over the past week by Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini, the divisions in the country’s largest labour federation have become even greater. And, amid a welter of contradiction and debates about constitutionality, it is not surprising that so much confusion reigns.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 20 July 2015
Workers ride in cattle trucks of the gravy train
We are constantly being told, as the economy stutters and stumbles, that “we are all in it together”; that we have a “shared future”; that we have a patriotic duty to “build the nation”. And, for all the tub-thumping rhetoric about the evils of capitalism, this will almost certainly be the underlying theme of the Cosatu special national congress next week.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 14 July 2015
Novels by South Africa’s Dickens given new life
“Alex La Guma has come home.” With those words, a visibly emotional Blanche La Guma last weekend received the first book, “hot off the presses” containing three of her late husband’s best-known novels, all of them banned in the apartheid era. The occasion was the initial launch of Alex La Guma - a colossus revisited at the literary festival in the small Western Cape resort town of Montagu.
Terry Bell
News | 6 July 2015
Why trade unions are even more relevant today
Trade unions — as democratic organisations of the sellers of labour — are probably more relevant now than they have ever been. Especially for anyone who feels that democracy is an important concept. Unfortunately, however, most of the unions remain narrowly focussed in a manner better suited to fighting the battles of an earlier era.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 29 June 2015
Is South Africa on a slippery slope?
Are we on a slippery slope to authoritarianism? It’s a valid question to ask since both the Cosatu and the national constitutions have been undermined. And they were both, in their own way, flag bearers of the democratic promise of the new South Africa.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 22 June 2015
New hope for labour movement
There is just the faintest breeze of renewal and democracy wafting through the bureaucratic corridors of Cosatu and disturbing the cobwebs of dogma that have tangled up due process in the country’s largest labour federation. It comes in the form of the election of David Sipunzi as general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Terry Bell
News | 15 June 2015
FIFA, Qatar and the ugly game
The terrible tragedy of the earthquake in Nepal has been swept off the front pages and news leads by the bribery scandal and arrests at FIFA. But they should be linked because it is the blood and suffering of many Nepalese workers that is a major cause of soccer now being seen as the ugly game.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 8 June 2015