Day: February 24, 2025

*18 February 2025* *SAFTU Statement on the Fourth Quarter 2024 Labour Force Survey – 18 February 2025* The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) notes with deep concern the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for Q4 2024, released today by Statistics South Africa. The data confirms what SAFTU has consistently warned: there is nothing to celebrate. The expanded unemployment rate remains catastrophically high at 41.9%, indicating no significant improvement in the dire jobs crisis. Even more troubling is that six out of nine provinces continue to suffer unemployment…

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Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. There are days when the dusk of events settles heavily on me, and I try to find a way to retreat into a quiet corner and throw myself into the world of a book. It does not matter if it is a novel or a history book, as long as the author is able to conjure up a world that transports me from the flood of brutalities to an island of imagination. In recent months, I have been…

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Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Lost in a colonial fog of inferiority, writers across Asia imagined a world that was beyond the reach of colonialism’s devastation. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) wrote a remarkable story called ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’; the story, published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, came out when the great French science fiction novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) was only seven years old. Dutt’s account is not strictly science fiction, but largely futuristic. The eighteen-year-old…

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