Jim will discuss challenges facing workers, students, and the poor in post-Apartheid South Africa, and NUMSA’s work galvanizing other trade unions, as well as grassroots organizations, in the fight against inequality, poverty, and unemployment in South Africa. Goodman and Jim will consider new horizons for protest in South Africa and across the continent and the need for international solidarity with these new movements.

AMY GOODMAN is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now! An acclaimed international journalist, she has won the Right Livelihood Award — widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize; a lifetime achievement award from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism; the George Polk Award; Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting; and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Amy is the New York Times bestselling author, with Denis Moynihan, of The Silenced Majority and Breaking the Sound Barrier; and with David Goodman, of Exception to the Rulers, Static, and Standing Up to the Madness. Her newest title is Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. She is a syndicated columnist for King Features.

IRVIN JIM was elected general secretary of NUMSA in October 2008, 17 years after he first joined NUMSA. As a student, Jim was active in South Africa’s youth movement in the late 1980’s. In 1991, he had to abandon his tertiary studies and to help support his family financially. Following the fall of apartheid in 1994, he became NUMSA’s Regional Chairperson for the Eastern Cape region, at that time the youngest member of the NUMSA Central Committee. A fearless leader of workers and an unwavering advocate for the working class, Jim has earned his reputation by consistently fighting in the front lines of working class struggle. Together with the rest of NUMSA’s leadership, Jim has not shied away from criticizing the ANC government on poverty, unemployment and inequality. Undeterred by the pressure on him to accept the status quo, he stands resolute in the struggle to build a South Africa for all South Africans.