JOHANNESBURG, Sept 21 (AFP) - Red October, a campaign aimed at building South Africa's working class and creating jobs for rural people, was jointly launched Tuesday night by the communist party and the country's largest labour federation, COSATU, reports said.

"It is the beginning of a fusion between labour movements and the communist forces to strengthen the struggle for socialism and advance the working class fight," South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande said at the launch, according to the SAPA news agency.

Red October, he added, would focus on empowering the working class and recruiting more members to the SACP and the 1.8-million strong Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

"The working class are assets and building them is a positive move towards economic growth and social development," Nzimande said.

An integral part of Red October, he added, was to reach out to farmworkers and "the rural masses."

He said joint socialist forums and units would be formed in industrial and rural areas through intensive recruitment campaigns among workers.

Nzimande promised workers that the campaign would address South Africa's jobs crisis -- at least 30 percent of the active workforce is unemployed -- the government's macro-economic policy, education, the crime problem, gender equality and HIV/AIDS in the workplace.

COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said the campaign would strengthen the SACP as the vanguard of the workers.

He said the working class faced an enormous challenge with the growing gap between the rich and the poor, increasing attacks on the quality of jobs through casualisation and sweatshops, mounting poverty and diseases.

"Do not just get workers into COSATU, but develop soldiers for a socialist future," he said. "Educate the working class so that they will survive on their own if retrenched."

Both COSATU and the SACP are election allies of the ruling African National Congress, their ties going back to the apartheid days when they united to oppose the then white minority government.

President Thabo Mbeki's 42-member government -- ministers and deputy ministers -- contains nine communists, at least three of them in key portfolios. It also contains six former trade unionists.

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