The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
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Two decades ago, a psychology student doing his training at one of Argentina's oldest psychiatric wards kept being asked by his family and friends what it was like to work in there. So he came up with an idea: to let the patients explain in their own words. The first radio station to broadcast from inside a mental hospital was born. Radio La Colifata - has been on air from Hospital Jose Borda in Buenos Aires for 23 years. The voices it includes are enough to make anyone in the mainstream...
Chris Hedges -
MINISINK, N.Y.—The affable, soft-spoken dairy farmer stood outside his 70-stall milking barn on his 230-acre family farm. When his father started farming there in 1950 were about 800 dairy farms in New York state’s Orange County. Only 39 survive. Small, traditional farms have been driven out of business by rising real estate prices, genetic manipulation of cows, industrial-scale hormone use that greatly increases milk production, wildly fluctuating milk prices and competition from...
An international summit on reparations for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade took place in New York last week. Participants demanded that European and American governments compensate the descendants of African people for slavery, forced free labor, and systemic racism and discrimination within the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. The New York summit was historic in that 15 Caribbean countries that comprise CARICOM (the Caribbean Community) are finalizing how to extract...
Fazila Farouk -
Analysts argue that the expulsions of Zwelinzima Vavi and Numsa from Cosatu, by a faction sympathetic to President Jacob Zuma, have clear consequences for a major re-alignment of labour in South Africa. Perhaps more importantly it forces to the fore significant consequences for the re-alignment of politics in South Africa.
Numsa, the radical metalworkers’ union, is in fact hosting a “Conference for Socialism” this very week to determine whether the ground in South Africa...
The White House has announced that President Obama intends to remove Cuba from the U.S. government's list of nations that sponsor terrorism. This issue was discussed by presidents Obama and Castro on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas that took place in Panama City last week. Aviva Chomsky, author of The Cuba Reader and A History of the Cuban Revolution comments on diplomatic developments between the two nations. She argues that the presence of Cuba on the list of state sponsors of...
Femke Brandt -
The Labour Relations Amendment Act of 2014 (section 198 of the LRA) introduces important new rights for labour broker, contract and part-time workers. Two issues emerge in relation to how these new labour rights affect farmworkers in the Karoo. Firstly, it is highly unlikely that the amendments will improve the lives of farmworkers directly. The introduction of more progressive rights for farmworkers is resulting in a backlash from farmers. Secondly, these new rights or yet another round of...
