"Comrade when you are caught inside you are on your own – if the company dismisses you, we cannot do anything for you, your power and strength you will get from those workers you must still organise," ex- Numsa official, cde Bernie Fanaroff told delegates when he shared our rich history with delegates on the first night of the NBC.
Individuals like cde Bernie Fanaroff, Les Kettledas, Moss Mayekiso, organised workers under difficult circumstances. The lesson we can learn from our own history is that if you are committed to the workers' struggle you are prepared to do anything even if it means losing your job. In the NBC debate over whether shop stewards should be paid for skills acquired through various training, this lesson seems to have been forgotten.
How do we keep our shopstewards, why do we lose so many comrades to management? Does being a shopsteward guarantee a career path to filling human resource posts and seats in parliament? These are but a few questions that emerged.
The General Secretary said "It is a reality that in the auto companies shopstewards are being graded according to the training they receive by Numsa and their company training. And in the absence of policy they negotiate their own plant level incentives. Comrade Petrus Ngcobo of KZN warned "don't throw a stone in the bush/forest, you might not know what will come out and bite you."
The conference resolved that head office should circulate a paper for discussion at local and regional level to ensure that the union develops a policy on this serious issue.
Source
Numsa News