ANC does not consider black workers human: Irvin Jim

The ANC does not recognise black workers as human beings, Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim said.

"Because of the continuing low and violent colonial wages of the black and African working class, we are seeing violent and militant strikes every day," he said in a speech prepared for delivery on Sunday.

"But our bosses and the ANC government want us to survive on low, savage and violent colonial wages and meanwhile we must remain humble, be gentle, non-violent and easy to manipulate and handle during strikes."

The National Union of Metalworkers of SA leader said at the Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture in Queenstown, Eastern Cape that this proved that the "white supremacist capitalist philosophy and ideology" still continued after 1994.

"Both white monopoly capital and our African National Congress government now somehow think that we the black and African working class must be happy with our inferior colonial wages and inferior inhuman social conditions," he said.

"They do not regard us as full human beings, we the black and African working class."

He said the ANC's Freedom Charter was "dumped in favour of pleasing white monopoly capital and global imperialism".