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BL Premium reports that the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC) said on Sunday that the government could not go back on its 4.7% wage increase offer, as Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana did last week, because “the law states that the last offer stands”.
According to the council, Godongwana might have misspoken, but labour analyst and Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Michael Bagraim said it was more likely that the state had realised it could not afford the offer and was backing out. The situation sets the scene for renewed strife in the public sector if the parties cannot come to an agreement. The PSCBC’s comment came after Godongwana said at a media briefing ahead of last week’s medium-term budget policy statement that the National Treasury had rejected the PSCBC facilitation process that had resulted in the proposed 4.7% offer. The outcome of that process had been that “we must move to 4.7% and in six months’ time we move to 1.3% and it becomes 6%", Godongwana noted. “As a proposal we have not accepted [this]. Unions are now going to get their new mandates, but I’m saying that proposal was from a facilitation process, it’s not necessarily a full offer on the table,” Godongwana claimed. PSCBC general secretary Frikkie De Bruin said the problem with the minister’s statement was that “he can’t reject his own offer. I think it was a slip of the tongue and he wanted to say they reject the 7.5%, but I’m not sure. The 4.5% offer is the last offer on the table and the law states that the last offer stands.” De Bruin pointed out that public service unions representing 1.3-million public servants, including teachers, the police and nurses, were still busy seeking mandates from their members on whether or not to accept or reject the 4.7% offer.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Luyolo Mkentane at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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