What is there to celebrate when thousands of skilled workers and miners still fight for salary increases? Perhaps we should instead commemorate the Marikana mine workers on this day instead of Workers Day because there are so many cries in this country about the unfairness and inequalities in workplaces, especially where a black and white person is concerned.
Today, workers are still fighting for better working conditions and fair salaries, yet we have the 1st of May every year as a Worker’s Day holiday; clearly, it is not for South Africans. These holidays are very misleading; one would think that because specific incidents are commemorated, we have conquered while still enslaved. Some workers travel two or more hours to their workplaces daily, and half of their salaries or wages go to transportation.
Hugh Masekela’s Coal Train is a suitable song for Workers Day in Africa because the Coal train has taken many forms of transportation. In the Eastern Cape, a taxi takes young people to work on the farms in Gqeberha; they return home when the season ends and are jobless until the following season. This is what the coal train did to our ancestors, so instead of celebrating something that is not worth celebrating, we should look for the persistence of these issues and find a way to resolve them. The 1st May is not for celebration but for sitting down and finding ways to resolve these issues because it cannot be that something that happened to our ancestors in the 1800s is still happening to us today; something is very wrong.
We cannot bring children to inherit our problems, instead this current generation must be a generation of problem solvers, but that cannot happen if we celebrate holidays that means nothing to us, our history and present. Other workers get what they deserve and work reasonable hours, but not all. Then what about those who work more hours but get paid peanuts? Others are seen, and others are not. Maybe the qualifications speak for them; what about those who do not have them? They must earn peanuts regardless of the hard work they put in? that would mean skill is insufficient or does not count, but qualification does. These are the inequalities we should be talking about today. This Workers Day holiday is for certain people because some workers will return to work to face the same issues celebrated as being solved today.