L E A Callaghan, Kenilworth
Your John Harvey is to be commended for drawing to our attention the unpleasant aspects of noisy working after hours and over weekends and public holidays which are I am sure, in conflict with our constitutional rights to an environment that is not harmful to our health and well-being.
Surely this insistence by the developers and their contractors that such work take place late at night and over the recognised off days has not been observed by COSATU and the building labourers’ trade unions and one asks what such official bearers are doing on behalf of their members, especially as these union officials insist on being rewarded with a Top Billing lifestyle through the enforced deductions from the pittances members earn for these long hours.
However, I am also concerned that this development is destined to accommodate more students: to jump up on the desks in the lecture halls, to torch the university buildings and the Jamie Shuttles, to defecate and smear their defecations over public walls and some statues, to wrestle with security guards and to hurl brickbats at passers-by.
I do not think that the average right thinking member of our readership is ready to accept such behaviour as normal and acceptable.
Our readers are, I venture to suggest, the core of those who opposed the Nationalists’ Apartheid experiment, before the Nationalist Party membership holus bolus merged with the ANC, but we, especially our womenfolk who endured long hours in the sun bearing their Black Sash placards, and being drenched by the tubercular sputum from those who objected to their silent and peaceful protests, worked to abolish apartheid.
This letter has been shortened.