The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) extends revolutionary end-of-year greetings to all affiliates, leaders, shop stewards, members and the broader working class. As 2025 draws to a close, South Africa remains trapped in a deep structural crisis marked by mass unemployment, deindustrialisation, collapsing public services, rising criminality, gender-based violence, and an austerity framework that continues to shift the burden of crisis onto workers and the poor.
Yet 2025 also confirmed a fundamental truth: when workers organise, mobilise and act collectively, we can resist and we can win. Throughout the year, SAFTU remained an independent, militant and principled voice of the working class — in workplaces, communities, courts, the streets and the policy arena.
Jobs, Deindustrialisation and the Fight for Decent Work
From the beginning of the year, SAFTU warned against false narratives of “recovery” while jobs were being destroyed and manufacturing hollowed out. Interventions around plant closures, retrenchments and job losses exposed jobless growth and the systematic replacement of full-time employment with precarious, low-paid work.
NUMSA’s resistance to deindustrialisation and FAWU’s workplace struggles were central to this fight, reinforcing SAFTU’s call for a worker-led Just Transition that protects jobs, rebuilds productive capacity and rejects profit-driven abandonment of communities.
From the Job-Loss Bloodbath to Organised Campaigns and Task Teams
As the scale of job losses deepened into a full-blown bloodbath in 2025, SAFTU deliberately shifted from analysis and protest to organisation and implementation.
Following the Extended Campaigns Committee meeting of 18 September 2025, which adopted a clear Programme of Action in response to mass retrenchments, factory closures, deindustrialisation and austerity, SAFTU convened a Campaigns Operations Task Team meeting on 29 September 2025. This meeting was explicitly convened not as a discussion forum, but as an operational workshop to ensure that resolutions translate into action.
The General Secretary stressed that the greatest danger facing the federation is the adoption of resolutions without follow-through.
The meeting constituted concrete Campaigns Operations Task Teams, with union allocations, responsibilities and deadlines, to drive implementation. These included:
• A Central Task Team Against Job Losses, mandated to demand a moratorium on retrenchments (especially in profitable companies), coordinate rapid responses to factory and mine closures, escalate towards factory and mine occupations, lead solidarity and legal strategies, and link workplace struggles to community mobilisation.
• A Scrap the Labour Bill Campaign Task Team, mandated to resist labour law amendments that lower retrenchment thresholds, normalise labour broking, weaken collective bargaining and undermine the right to strike, through rolling protests, workplace mobilisation and mass political education.
• A Hunger Campaign Task Team – Hunger as a Weapon of Class War, mandated to expose profiteering and obscene CEO pay, demand legislation banning the destruction of edible food, establish solidarity kitchens as organising hubs, and advance a National Day of Action on Hunger.
• A Water Crisis Task Team – No Water, No Life, mandated to mobilise for mass action including the 1 November Water Crisis March, frame water as a Section 27 constitutional right, and expose corruption, tenderisation and service collapse in municipalities.
• A Housing Task Team – Shack Dwellers’ Cry, mandated to launch a Housing Oversight Programme, publish quarterly corruption reports, provide legal defence for resisting communities, and demand in-situ upgrading with services.
• A Health and Oncology Task Team – Death by Neglect, mandated to work with the Treatment Action Campaign and Cancer Alliance to publish monthly reports on waiting times and broken machines, support litigation enforcing patients’ rights, demand the filling of frozen posts, and campaign for a national cervical cancer strategy.
• An Anti-Austerity Task Team – The Common Thread, mandated to build a broad anti-austerity front, mobilise against budgets and the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, publish revenue alternatives including wealth taxes and redirection of GEPF/PIC funds, and integrate anti-austerity across all sectoral struggles.
• A Competition Commission Task Team – Holding Corporates Accountable, mandated to prepare sectoral dossiers, engage the Competition Commission, and campaign for stronger merger conditions including extended no-retrenchment clauses and mandatory local investment.
• A Private Security Task Team – Wage Theft, Compliance and Insourcing, mandated to expose widespread statutory deduction fraud, defend whistle-blowers, organise security workers into independent and militant unions, advance the insourcing of government security functions, and hold the FSCA and the Department of Employment and Labour accountable.
These task teams form the operational backbone of SAFTU’s campaigns as the federation moves into 2026.
May Day 2025: Unity in Action
May Day 2025 was reclaimed as a day of struggle, not ceremony. SAFTU and its affiliates mobilised nationally around demands for permanent employment, living wages, an end to austerity, and the rebuilding of public services and industry. Despite divisions within the broader labour movement, May Day stood as a powerful moment of unity in action from below.
Historic Breakthroughs in Public Employment and Care Work
One of the most significant advances of 2025 was achieved in the struggle against permanent precarity in public employment.
SAFTU records as a real and substantive victory the progress made toward the integration of Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Community Caregivers (CCGs) into the public health system. This breakthrough challenged outsourcing, poverty wages and chronic insecurity imposed on essential workers.
This was reinforced by:
• NUPSAW-led marches and mobilisation demanding the uniform absorption of EPWP workers, CHWs and CCGs across all provinces
• MATUSA’s landmark EPWP victory in eThekwini, one of the most important worker gains of the year
• Continued demands for the recognition, proper funding and decent employment of Early Childhood Development (ECD) workers
These gains directly confronted austerity, hiring freezes and the hollowing-out of the state.
Workplace and Legal Victories
• FAWU’s Labour Court victory against SAB/AB InBev reaffirmed that multinational capital is not untouchable and that disciplined worker organisation can defeat union-busting and exploitation.
• SAFTU welcomed the High Court ruling blocking Eskom’s R54 billion tariff clawback, offering partial relief to households battered by years of electricity price hikes, while reiterating the call for tariff reversal and a publicly driven, socially owned energy transition.
Governance Crisis, Corruption and the Defence of Democracy
2025 marked a turning point in confronting systemic corruption. Following the explosive public press conference by General Mkhwanazi, SAFTU was among those that explicitly called for the establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry. The subsequent establishment of the Madlanga Commission, intensified SIU investigations, and high-profile arrests were cautiously welcomed as steps toward accountability.
At the same time, SAFTU warned that corruption in South Africa is enforced through violence. The continued killings of whistle-blowers remain an attack on democracy itself. SAFTU demands full protection for whistle-blowers, an end to political protection of criminal networks, and genuine systemic accountability rather than selective justice.
Labour Law and Regulations: Defending Hard-Won Gains
SAFTU intervened decisively on regulations issued by the Minister of Employment and Labour. The federation:
• Rejected provisions that threatened to reverse hard-won worker protections, weaken dismissal safeguards, enable casualisation and undermine collective bargaining
• Welcomed progressive aspects that strengthened clarity, enforcement and worker protections
This principled engagement reaffirmed SAFTU’s role as a serious, class-based federation that defends workers’ rights while engaging substantively on policy.
Defending Public Goods: Legislative Battles
In a hostile environment marked by sustained pressure from business and right-wing forces, SAFTU defended key defensive legislative victories:
• National Health Insurance (NHI) — defended as a working-class gain for universal healthcare, while insisting on proper funding, strong public capacity and protection of health workers’ rights
• Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) — welcomed as a defence of public education against inequality and privatisation, with a call for democratic and progressive implementation
These gains were achieved despite austerity and neoliberal macroeconomic constraints that continue to undermine implementation.
Criminality, Gender-Based Violence and Community Safety
Throughout 2025, SAFTU expressed unambiguous outrage at rampant criminality and the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide, particularly against working-class women and children. SAFTU linked GBV to unemployment, poverty, patriarchy, substance abuse and institutional collapse, condemning the state’s failure to protect communities.
Setbacks and Lessons: Recommitting to Unity
SAFTU acknowledges as a serious setback the public spat between SAFTU and COSATU during 2025. While political differences are real and principled, public conflict weakens the working class at a time of deep crisis.
SAFTU therefore reaffirms its commitment to working-class unity based on the Labour School Declaration — unity grounded in worker control, independence from political parties and capital, militancy against austerity, and unity in action rooted in real struggles.
Ten-a-Side Coordination and Rebuilding Unity from Below
To rebuild unity from below, SAFTU convened a Ten-a-Side Meeting on 30 October 2025, bringing together SAFTU-affiliated unions and a broad range of working-class formations, including organisations of the unemployed, health activists, anti-hunger campaigns, mining-affected communities and water crisis committees.
The Ten-a-Side process aims to rebuild structured coordination between workplace and community struggles, overcome fragmentation, consolidate struggles into a single Working-Class Programme of Action, and prepare the ground for a Fourth Working-Class Summit. This process will continue into 2026, including the scheduled January Ten-a-Side meeting.
Organisational Renewal and the Fight Against Corruption in the Labour Movement
2025 also marked an important moment of organisational renewal. SAFTU welcomed the return of the Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union (YNITU) to the federation, formalised through a joint SAFTU–YNITU statement reaffirming worker control, democratic governance, accountability and militant trade unionism.
The return of YNITU was not merely administrative. It represented a principled stand against corruption, factionalism and elite capture within the trade union movement itself. SAFTU and YNITU jointly affirmed that:
• Trade unions exist to serve workers, not leaders
• Union resources are not personal property
• Democratic mandates and constitutional processes are non-negotiable
Looking Ahead to 2026
As SAFTU enters 2026, the tasks are clear:
• End austerity and rebuild the public sector
• Permanently absorb EPWP workers, CHWs, CCGs and ECD workers
• Defend and rebuild manufacturing and productive capacity
• Advance insourcing, decent work and living wages
• Confront corruption, criminality and gender-based violence
• Rebuild principled working-class unity
Conclusion
2025 was a year of intense struggle, real victories, hard lessons and renewed clarity. SAFTU and its affiliates defended jobs and public services, won concrete gains for precarious workers, defended public healthcare and education, confronted corruption and criminality, renewed organisational integrity, and recommitted to principled unity.
A statement was issued on behalf of the SAFTU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
For media inquiries, contact the National Spokesperson at:
Newton Masuku
newtonm@saftu.org.za
0661682157
Media Officer
Asive Dyani
0719019564
