NUMSA Bulletin - Time to face the bosses
Item
- Title
- NUMSA Bulletin - Time to face the bosses
- Creator
- NUMSA
- Date
- 07-Mar
- Description
- It is often said that it is not enough to be busy in the trade union movement or even in the corporate environment nowadays. The big question is: what is it you are busy with? What to do about countless scheduled or impromptu meetings, political sessions, mass campaigns, workshops, relationship and capacity- building consultations in the regions and nationally, has become another matter of daily debates in our structures. Everyone in the labour movement has a view on why this and that meeting or the other campaign has to be taken up with urgency. Many of us are regarded as experts on labour activities. And this results in time pressures and internal hurly-burly. It is because the organization must achieve its ultimate goals in the end. Ultimate goals inform our major organizational objectives ranked by their highest priority. These include progress on the motor recruitment campaign. the white-collar workers recruitment drive, monitoring major bargaining, food prices, fuel price increases and the latest CPI-X and regional policy workshops, culminating in the National Bargaining Conference in April 2007. Charles Schwab, the world's greatest industrialist. with great ability and perspicacity, is known as a most efficient, fabulously rich steel worker who led and transformed the Bethlehem Steel plant into the largest independent global steel producer. But, that did not immunize him from pressures and time-wasting interruptions. He once issued a challenge to a management consultant to show him the way to get more things done with his time and promised to "pay any fee within reason.†The consultant, without hesitation gave him a pad of blank paper and wrote on it: “Each night write down the things you have to do tomorrow, number them in the order of their importance. Start working on priority item number one and continue until finished. Then start item number two, then three, and do not worry if you have not managed to finish them.†The consultant was paid handsomely within seconds of dispensing this discreet advice. She was probably paid a million dollars or more. Some extremely important considerations arise in relation to this big question, as we intensify our 2007 programme of confronting the class logic of capital through collective bargaining. We have to look at them carefully, if we are to realize the objectives we have set for the giant metalworkers’ union this year.
- Subject
- Check
- Format
- Language
- English
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/116122
- Archive
- Cory Library for Humanities Research, Rhodes University
- Provenance
- The item is held at the Cory Library for Humanities Research, Rhodes University, on behalf of the Labour Research Service
- Extent
- 52 pages
- Use/re-use
- The materials are made available explicitly for research and educational purposes. Any use of these materials must be cleared with the Labour Research Service.
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