MEDIA ALERT
The General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA) had noted with profound dismay and outrage eMedia’s announcement that it intends to retrench 171 of 309 employees at eNCA – a staggering 55% of its workforce – under the guise of transitioning to a “digital-first newsroom.”
While the media landscape is evolving, this is not a story about technology. This is a story about choice – and eMedia has chosen profits over people.
They can afford workers, they choose not to – the real cost of greed
Barely weeks ago, eMedia Holdings published remuneration disclosures in line with recent amendments to the Companies Act. The numbers lay bare the structural inequality that defines the media sector and, indeed, the broader economy:
- Group CEO Khalik Sherrif earned R19 million in the 2025 financial year, including a R10.3 million bonus – a single individual’s compensation exceeding the combined annual earnings of nearly 194 entry-level employees.
- The company’s lowest-paid employee earned just R98,000 per year – a sum that, in real terms, barely sustains a working-class family in South Africa’s current cost-of-living crisis.
- The group reported R3 billion in revenue and a profit of R299.5 million – meaning the company is not in distress, nor is it facing any existential threat.
And yet, management now claims it cannot afford 171 workers?
Let us interrogate this logic. When an enterprise generates nearly R300 million in profit, and its chief executive receives a bonus alone that dwarfs the annual wages of hundreds of employees, the claim of “operational necessity” collapses under its own weight.
Retrenchments in such a context are not a business necessity – they are a political and ideological choice in the interests of shareholders and profiteering over workers and their families. They represent a deliberate decision to:
- Protect shareholder returns and executive compensation at the expense of working-class livelihoods.
- Restructure the workforce not to save a failing company, but to extract greater surplus value from fewer, more precarious employees.
- Shift the burden of technological transition onto workers, while those who control capital bear none of the cost.
This is the logic of capital in its purest form: when profits are high, they are privatised as bonuses and dividends; when adjustments are needed, the costs are socialised through job losses and community devastation. The working class is told to tighten its belt while the executive class loosens its purse strings.
This is not a crisis of affordability. It is a crisis of priorities – and the priority at eMedia is clearly not the 171 workers whose lives hang in the balance, nor the communities who depend on credible journalism. The priority is the relentless accumulation of wealth at the top, regardless of the human toll.
Workers should be absolutely clear: in a profitable enterprise, retrenchments are not a necessity. They are class war from above – a political choice to redistribute upward and concentrate wealth while casting working people aside.
Crisis for democracy
At a time when fake news, disinformation, and coordinated propaganda campaigns flood our public discourse—often weaponised by powerful interests to distort reality and manufacture consent—the role of credible, independent, public-interest journalism has never been more vital. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely at this historical moment that eMedia has chosen to dismantle its news-gathering capacity.
eNCA, for all its limitations, remains one of the few broadcasters with a genuine national footprint—reaching not only urban centres but also the peri-urban, rural, and township communities where alternative information sources are scarce. Weakening this infrastructure weakens democracy itself, because democracy without information is merely a ritual, not a reality.
It must be acknowledged that eNCA, like all commercial media, operates within the logic of capital—where news is a commodity, audiences are markets, and profitability ultimately shapes editorial priorities. These include a troubling tendency to platform reactionary viewpoints under the guise of “balanced debate,” sometimes lending legitimacy to xenophobic and other regressive narratives. This is not unique to eNCA; it is a systemic feature of a media industry that prioritises ratings over responsibility.
The institution we are defending here is itself compromised by the very commercial logic that now drives its restructuring.
The question, however, is not whether eNCA is a perfect vehicle for working-class representation—it is not—but whether its dismantling serves the interests of working people or capital. The answer is clear: mass retrenchments serve only capital.
Whilst we are not privy to the meaning of the new model and cannot pretend to understand it, we can say with absolute certainty that any downscaling is an attack on working-class representation in the public discourse.
One just has to go slightly back in history when ENCA implemented similar cuts.
Those cuts hollowed out eNCA’s news-gathering capacity, making it increasingly difficult for the broadcaster to maintain a physical presence in remote and marginalised areas. Today, it is already a struggle to find an eNCA reporter on the ground in large parts of Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape, and other rural provinces. The planned retrenchments will accelerate this process, effectively severing the last threads of media coverage in communities that are already invisible to the mainstream.
Therefore, this restructuring is not simply a matter of reducing headcount. It represents a qualitative transformation in how news is produced, framed, and disseminated—with profound class implications for communities, workers and our movement.
When field-based journalists – who bear the material conditions of the communities they cover – are replaced by studio-bound analysts, what is fundamentally altered is the class character of reportage. The reporter on the ground brings more than a camera; they bring a relationship to the lived reality of working people. They witness and visualise:
- The dusty streets of rural villages where water trucks are the only lifeline.
- The cramped shack settlements synonymous with broken sewers and piles of uncollected rubbish on the peripheries of the cities, where evictions loom, and services are a promise unkept.
- The factory floors and mining towns where occupational disease, wage theft, and casualisation define the daily existence of the working class.
- The community halls where residents organise against utility cut-offs, privatisation and unemployment.
These spaces are not merely “stories”—they are the material sites of class struggle. When they are no longer covered, they become invisible to public discourse. And what is invisible cannot be defended.
The shift toward studio-bound analysis is not technologically neutral. It has enormous political implications for the formation of public opinion. It elevates the pundit class – experts, academics, corporate spokespeople, and think-tank representatives – who speak about the working class but do not share its conditions nor their interests. These voices are disproportionately drawn from privileged strata, often aligned with the interests of capital, and their framing of issues tends to naturalise exploitation, inequalities and oppressions rather than interrogate them.
These framing choices have consequences. They shape public opinion, influence policy, and ultimately determine what is considered legitimate grievance and what is dismissed as noise.
When the only voices amplified are those who serve capital, the public sphere ceases to be a space of democratic contestation. It becomes an echo chamber for the powerful, a mechanism for manufacturing consent, and a tool for delegitimising working-class struggles.
The retrenchments at eNCA are therefore not merely an attack on 171 workers. They are an attack on the material conditions of working-class representation itself. They constitute a structural shift that systematically marginalises the voices of the many in favour of the few—not by conspiracy, but by the inexorable logic of profit-driven restructuring.
This is how democracy is hollowed out—not through coups or censorship, but through the steady erosion of the institutions that make democratic participation possible. The eNCA retrenchments are one more brick in that wall.
A call to the eMedia workers and entire labour movement
This is not merely a dispute at one broadcaster. It is a signal of what awaits working people across all sectors if we allow capital to dictate terms without resistance.
We call on the entire South African labour movement – trade unions, federations, community organisations, and worker committees – to:
- Stand in solidarity with the 171 eNCA workers facing the axe.
- Mobilise in their defence, whether through pickets, petitions, or public campaigns.
- Reject the narrative that profit margins must come before human livelihoods.
- Expose the hypocrisy of corporations that plead poverty while paying executives millions and shareholders hundreds of millions of rands earned by the sweat and blood of workers they treat with contempt.
But all of these depend first and foremost on the ENCA and eMedia Holding workers as a whole standing up and fighting. GIWUSA is offering its support to this end.
The eNCA retrenchments are not an isolated incident. They are part of a broader pattern across industries where workers are sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value while executives enrich themselves. This is the logic of capital in its purest form: accumulate, concentrate, and discard human beings when they are no longer deemed “profitable.”
But workers are not commodities to be discarded. Journalism is not a cost to be cut. Public discourse is not a luxury to be downsized.
Issued by:
The General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA)
For comment call:
Mametlwe Sebei – GIWUSA President
081 368 0706 / mametlwesebei@gmail.com