trade unions

The newly-appointed Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan presented the 2010/11 National Budget to Parliament on 17 February 2010 in Cape Town.

As in the past few years, SANGONeT is pleased to present you with the comments and perspectives of various NGOs in response to the budget.

Issues covered by the NGO comments range from general observations about the budget to key development priorities such as education, social services, gender, urbanisation, children and health.

In our response to President Zuma`s State of the Nation Speech last week, SACTWU issued a press release which stated the following:

SADTU welcomes Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s budget speech presented in Parliament this afternoon. We welcome the fact that education continues to be our government’s number one priority. The R165 billion given to education attests to this.

We note the following on matters of education:

NEHAWU welcomes the Budget Speech that was tabled before parliament today by the Minister of Finance, Mr Pravin Gordhan and we are happy with the government’s commitment to increase and shift government spending on key priority areas with the intention to create a new growth path for the local economy.

Whilst there are important commitments in the budget speech which we support such as increased allocations for HIV/AIDS although we are concerned that the spending over the Medium Term Expenditure Framework period remains moderate.

The People’s Budget Campaign (PBC) is a civil society coalition comprising of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO). This coalition has for the past ten years tabled proposals on the spending of revenue by the National Treasury and argued for a participatory budget process.

The People’s Budget Campaign (PBC) is a civil society coalition comprising of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO). This coalition has for the past ten years tabled proposals on the spending of revenue by the National Treasury and argued for a participatory budget process.

A month after the Sunday Independent reported that the SABC had run up a deficit of R500m, the Mail & Guardian reports that the deficit now stands at R700m. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is appalled, as this report, if correct, indicates that the public broadcaster has lost R200m in one month.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions is appalled that only a month after the Sunday Independent reported that the SABC had run up a deficit of R500m, the Mail & Guardian has reported that the deficit now stands at R700m. If both these reports are correct, the public broadcaster has lost R200m in a single month!

This book has been titled Labour Pains to reflect the intensity of the struggle for gender equality in the trade union movement and society. Produced by the National Labour and Economic Development Institute (NALEDI), the book acknowledges that while progress has been made on the development of policy for gendered change, it argues that little has been achieved in practice in terms of translating commitments into meaningful reality for working class women.