Thursday, 28 May 2020
Anna Majavu is a trade unionist and journalist currently completing a PhD in journalism.
Rather than allowing state clinics in Port Elizabeth’s impoverished areas to become Covid-19 vectors, health workers have shut them down until such time they are properly equipped.
State assistance, especially during the Covid-19 crisis, helps people who literally have nothing to eat. But it is too little and its delivery is too patchy to bring real relief.
For years, hundreds of people have been forced to live in half-built structures with no windows, electricity or running water while the Buffalo City municipality stalls for time.
The provincial government stands accused of corruption and hiding critical information from the public – and these are just two of the burning issues alarming residents.
International Workers’ Day this year may herald strikes by those labouring in healthcare whose safety and wellbeing during Covid-19 have been forgotten by their governments.
As retrenchments of thousands of SAA workers loom, unions say government never intended to save the airline beggared by years of corruption. Ultimately, workers will pay the price.
Residents of a rural Eastern Cape town are concerned that the government using a guesthouse to quarantine coronavirus patients from another small town will cause the virus to spread through theirs.
In several rural and peri-urban settlements in the province, impoverished residents can only dream of food aid and a consistent supply of clean water during the Covid-19 lockdown.
New contracts from the North West resort’s board of trustees, which the guards were told to sign or lose their jobs, downgrade their pay and take away their on-site accommodation.
The Covid-19 lockdown has been plagued by employers failing to provide workers with suitable protective gear while others have been downright breaking the law, say unions.
Shack residents are concerned that possible plans to fight Covid-19 by moving people out of overcrowded settlements onto unserviced land will amount to forced removals.
Farm worker Thandiswa Xali has been ordered to leave a farm where her family has lived for decades. She stands to lose both her home and her livelihood during the Covid-19 outbreak.
Government has stopped short of nationalising private hospitals, but unions and community-based organisations are pushing for free healthcare for all – now and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.
Phumla Runeli champions the right of residents in impoverished rural communities in the Eastern Cape to live in a safe and healthy environment.
The university town’s municipal council should step down at once in the wake of the ongoing water crisis, which could doom efforts to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
When the labour registrar deregistered Demawusa, it faced ruin. Now the Labour Court has suspended the ruling pending an appeal.
The politically connected Nelani family is suspected of thwarting a couple’s decade-long attempt to formalise the lease for the state-owned land they have farmed productively for 31 years.
Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality promised to build new homes for the residents of a condemned hostel built almost eight decades ago. But they are still living in cramped, unsanitary conditions.
After starting out in a garage, the first township-based fencing team in the Eastern Cape is having a go at the national championships.
Private security guards in George have been reporting the unfair labour practices of their employers to various government bodies for years, but they have been largely ignored.
The Eastern Cape town is a desperate place for its residents, many of whom are forced to stay in houses overrun with effluent, while the municipality does nothing.