Religion and Politics

Lay Preacher Turned Union Boss Wages S.African Class War

Reuters’ Ed Stoddard and Ndundu Sithole report on a lay preacher’s surge to prominence in South African labor relations. Joseph Mathunjwa, president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, “has won tens of thousands of followers portraying himself as a Christian soldier fighting for South Africa’s downtrodden miners.” Mathunjwa is seeking to “about double the current wages of the lowest-paid miners,” and they write that he has “tapped into a swelling vein of discontent among poor, black workers who have seen little improvement in their lives two decades after apartheid ended.”

Read at Reuters

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