Nehawu was formed in the early 1990s by workers to fight to improve working conditions and fight against retrenchments; outsourcing and white supremacy. In the same period the employer retrenched workers and outsourced services which Nehawu continued to fight for insourcing ever since. With the help of the student’s campaign for free education “# fees must fall” our campaign was strengthening and UCT management agreed to insource all the outsourced service from the 1 July 2016.
The only problem was contractual obligations with some private companies as results, it was not easy to insource all at once. However, through negotiations with those companies it was possible to reach an agreement to insource with only catering department whose contract extended to 2020. Through negotiations with the company a deal was concluded to insource workers in October 2016 retrospective from 1 July 2016.
Nehawu has continued to lead the fight to improve conditions of employment of workers at UCT. So much that UCT workers have better working conditions than workers in other universities in the country. Nehawu is currently in a campaign to improve university security and control access to the premises.