The Cry of the Xcluded (Cry X) salutes the workers of Parktonian Hotel in Braamfontein who, under the leadership of the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), downed tools on Wednesday, 22 July 2026, in defence of their basic conditions of employment. We stand unreservedly with these workers and with FAWU, and we associate ourselves fully with the call for a working-class boycott of the hotel until justice is done.

What is unfolding at Parktonian Hotel is not an isolated labour dispute. It is a textbook case of the arrogance with which the bosses treat workers when they believe they can act with impunity — scrapping long-service awards, abandoning provident fund contributions, defaulting on funeral insurance, withholding a backdated salary adjustment owed since February, delaying wages, and unilaterally converting monthly-salaried workers to hourly rates while imposing short-time without consultation. Each of these is a theft of dignity dressed up as management prerogative. Together, they amount to a frontal assault on collective bargaining itself.

This is precisely the terrain on which Cry X has always organised: the daily, grinding exclusion of working and poor people from the fruits of their own labour, enforced not only by unemployment and service delivery failure but by employers who treat hard-won rights as negotiable the moment workers’ backs are turned. The Parktonian workers’ struggle is the struggle of every excluded and exploited person in this country — for the right to be paid what is owed, on time, and to have a say in the conditions under which they labour.

We remind Parktonian Hotel’s management, and every employer watching this dispute, that the right to strike is not a favour extended by employers but a constitutional right won through generations of workers’ struggle. An employer that responds to unilateral rights violations with continued unilateralism, rather than genuine engagement with the recognised union, has forfeited any claim to be acting in good faith.

Cry X therefore calls on:

• All Cry X structures, affiliates and communities to refuse to patronise, book, or recommend Parktonian Hotel for any accommodation, meeting, workshop, conference or event until the dispute is resolved through real collective bargaining;
• Progressive political formations, civil society organisations, NGOs, churches, student movements and community organisations to join this boycott and to publicly declare their support for the striking workers;
• Government departments and public entities to refrain from using Parktonian Hotel for any official business while workers remain on strike;
• The broader labour movement and working class to intensify solidarity action in whatever form is available to them, understanding that an injury to the Parktonian workers is an injury to all of us.

Cry X further calls on Parktonian Hotel management to return to the negotiating table in good faith, to reverse the unilateral changes that provoked this strike, and to settle all outstanding payments owed to workers without further delay.

The Parktonian workers did not choose this fight. It was forced on them by an employer that mistook collective bargaining for a formality it could dispense with at will. Cry X will not be silent while workers are made to pay for their employer’s choices.

An Injury to one is an Injury to All!