BL Premium reports that the SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) has warned that strike action is in the offing if the parties to municipal wage talks fail to find each other in dispute resolution.
The union, which represents about 160,000 of SA’s 290,000 municipal workers, declared a dispute at the SA Local Government Bargaining Council (Salgbc) during the last round of talks held recently, and threatened to negotiate “on the streets”. The union advised that more than 80% of its members were balloted and “preliminary results are that workers in their majority have voted to go on strike”. Samwu claimed on Tuesday that the SA Local Government Association (Salga), which represents the country’s 257 municipalities, was negotiating in bad faith by pushing for workers to get below-inflation increases and for any benefits linked to pay increases to be frozen. In June, Samwu and the Independent Municipal & Allied Trade Union (Imatu) rejected an independent facilitator’s proposal for a three-year pay deal, with employees getting 4% in the first year, followed by CPI minus 1% for the second and third years. Expressing disappointment with Samwu’s decision to declare a dispute, Salga said on Monday that it had filed dispute papers at Salgbc. The association said it had opted for a section 47 referral in terms of the Labour Relations Act, which seeks to solve disputes affecting essential service workers through conciliation and arbitration. This, said Salga, was due to the “fact that all municipalities perform the designated essential services”, so the dispute could only be resolved through interest arbitration as opposed to strike action. However, Samwu’s Dumisane Magagula said that Salga could not “out of the blue” argue that municipal workers were essential service workers “when it suits them”. There was no law that all municipal workers cannot participate in the strike, he argued. Magagula indicated that the dispute-resolution process would “commence soon”.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Luyolo Mkentane at BusinessLive (paywall access only)
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page