Wage Negotiations: Is A Winter Of Discontent Looming?

With the Local Government Election virtually out of the way, labour relations exponents are predicting that tough wage negotiations are about to commence. Government, as a major employer is already facing a wage demand increase of 10 percent by the public sector trade unions and staff associations but countered with a 5 percent proposal which may be a precursor to the acrimonious and costly public sector strike experienced during 2010.

Wage negotiations in the metal and engineering sector got underway earlier this month and both the employer federation and trade unions expect extremely tough negotiations and the trade unions have not ruled out the possibility of wide-scale labour unrest. Six trade unions have submitted wage increase proposals, ranging from 15% to 20%. SEIFSA, the employer federation countered with 13 proposals and confirmed that it had received about 67 different proposals in total from Numsa, Solidarity, the Metal and Electrical Workers Union of South Africa, the United Workers Association of South Africa, the South African Equity Workers Association and the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union.

Once the negotiations commence the parties are expecting it to be a long and difficult process and a logical outcome would be to find a mutually acceptable compromise on what the many small and medium employers in the sector can afford under difficult trading conditions.

Numsa national spokesman, Castro Ngobese said that his union was going into the negotiations with the political and ideological conviction that better conditions of employment are indeed possible." We are going to demand a 20% wage increase across the board; a one year collective agreement and a total ban on labour brokers in the industry. Other demands will be tabled during the negotiations with the employers "he said.

“We want to warn the employers that these negotiations must be treated with seriousness because toyi-toyi did not end in 1994 and our demands will never be muzzled by charm offensive by the powers to be." He added that the negotiations are going to be about an equitable income distribution at the point of production, we refuse to allow the owning class to continue enriching itself through the hard labour of the workers. It is for this reason that these negotiations must be about an equal share of our country`s wealth to the benefit of the people as a whole" Ngobese said. Solidarity`s deputy-general secretary Gideon du Plessis said that his trade unions` demand was 15%. “Our argument is that the so-called workers’ inflation is about 12%. We take the element of the inflation basket, which is the worker`s cost of living, into consideration in our wage negotiations" he said.

The current agreement is based on negotiations with the trade unions during 2008 for a wage model which will expire on 30 June. During 2010 wage increases from 7.1% to 8.1% were implemented.

The outcomes of these negotiations are likely to impact on other sectors of the economy.

Pieter Rautenbach