BFTU to put policies to congress

The great challenge of the outgoing leadership will be to put these policies - apparently many of them not new to the older affiliates - to congress on March 24.  Congress is likely to elect a new leadership, perhaps the bulk of it from the newly registered trade unions, which emerge from the civil service whose employees were prohibited from full enjoyment of the right to'freedom of association'.

This right was extended to the government employee associations - several of them classified as 'essential services' thereby denying them the right to strike - only after parliamentary legislation in 2005 which put into legal effect the human rights conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).