COSATU spokesperson Alan Roberts: "There is a legacy in this country of terrible social imbalance"

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we must remove the state and install a democratic Schreiber visited South Africa in June. While there, he conducted interviews with leaders of the major organizations of the Black liberation and trade-union movements.

Following are major excerpts from Schreiber's interview with Alan Roberts, regional secretary for the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the Western Cape.

With close to 1.5 million members, COSATU is the largest union federation in the country. Together with the African National Congress, it organized a giant political strike on Aug. 3-4 of over 4 million people.

This interview took place in Capetown on June 3, 1992.

Socialist Action: What, in your opinion, are the most pressing issues the labor movement in South Africa must deal with?

Alan Roberts: We are locked into a radical process at the moment, in regard to our alliance with the ANC [African NationPaul Weinberg ORTS PEC And the violence that we see now is at its highest peak. More people are dying now than died during the state of emergency [in the late 1980s]. We see that as part of the state's strategy to try to undermine our structures in the community and all democratic structures.

At the second level, we have been calling for a national economic negotiations forum. We mean to stop the unilateral restructuring taking place by capital and the state. We've seen changes taking place in the tax system that are loaded in favor of big capital.

SA: I am told that unemployment in South Africa is now well over 40 percent.

AR: Yes.

SA: What demands would you address to the employers and the government in order to create more jobs?

AR: The economy is in a very bad state at the moment. And there have been massive retrenchments [layoffs] taking place over a long period of time. Now, we feel that the orientation of production in this country has been more towards luxury goods. In fact, we're seeing a shift towards mechanization. We are not opposed to mechanization, but the way it is used in this country is at the cost of jobs.

We don't have any power to challenge that. We challenge it as trade unionists, of course, but we need to take it into the macro level. And that's one of the issues we want to discuss in the economic negotiations forum.

SA: What do you mean by the macro level?

AR: The macro level? Let's say the national political level-via the national economic negotiations forum-and look at things like the type of restructuring taking place. We should be party to that, and look more at labor intensive industries. And then, of course, job creation schemes.

One area where we feel that jobs can be