Workers have just ended a strike over pay for Sunday work. Will this set a trend for escalating industrial action??
Glenda Daniels
The R2?500 pay deal that ended the two-week post office strike on Wednesday was “an inelegant face-saving exercise” between management and labour.
While ostensibly the crippling and costly strike was sparked off by the issue of triple pay for Sunday work and overtime pay, the real issues are restructuring, fear of job losses, an anti-privatisation drive and the strong line taken by management on productivity and efficiency, says labour analyst Gavin Brown.
“These issues have not been resolved and such a clash is going to happen again. The issue of triple pay for Sunday work was just a front for the real issues. But this R2?500 compensation deal was just a face-saving way to get workers back to work.
“I don’t think that there will be strikes over Sunday pay again this year from other unions,” Brown says.
The national strike of about 14?000 members of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU), a Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) affiliate, nearly resulted in economic chaos in the country, with 85 post offices closed and a backlog of 8,9-million postal items.
The strike was called off after the union accepted a deal where workers who went on strike would be paid R2?500 on April 1 for the withdrawal of benefits they enjoyed. This includes triple pay for Sunday work, which will now be paid at the rate of time-and-a-half during normal contracted shifts.
Department of Labour director general Rams Ramashia agrees with Brown on the Sunday pay issue.
“It would be premature to conclude that industrial action in respect of Sunday pay is going to escalate this year as a result of the post office dispute,” Ramashia says.
He adds that it “should be understood that that the government’s proposal on the regulation of Sunday work is not yet law as it has not yet been passed by Parliament. If the proposed amendment goes through in its present form, it will only affect workers not covered by collective bargaining arrangements that specify that work on Sunday should be higher than the normal rate.”
The Millennium Labour Council (MLC) a business and labour forum proposed last month that double pay should be remunerated at time-and-a-half. While Cosatu is party to this deal, its membership has not accepted this yet.
Cosatu representative Siphiwe Mgcina says the proposal is still being discussed by affiliates and that the federation stood firmly behind the CWU on its strike and their demands. “The matter of Sunday pay still has to be finalised at the National Economic, Development and Labour Council.”
Organised labour is being asked to consider sacrificing overtime and Sunday pay to create more jobs in South Africa.
The CWU says that even though it is against contract work and the casualisation of labour, it is amenable to making sacrifices so that the unemployed get a chance at jobs, albeit part-time work.
Sizwe Matshikiza, general secretary of the CWU, says the proposal by the MLC to cut Sunday pay to time-and-a-half has not yet been endorsed by Cosatu, so going on a strike over the issue had validity.
But he concedes that if there has been consultation by post office management it would have been possible for workers to have sacrificed overtime and Sunday work so that other workers might have a chance of getting work.
However, he points out that while this is the argument of business, parastatals and the public service, experience has shown that there has been little evidence of this trade-off.
“Promises of job creation through restructuring have come to naught. So far there has been no attempt to convince workers that the sacrificing of overtime work would mean one plate of food for one family. There has been no guarantee of job creation,” Matshikiza says.
Witspos representative Sandile Madola agrees there are no guarantees for job creation if workers compromise. “In fact we have too many workers. We are employing 26 000 people. This is too many. We have no plans at all to employ more people.”
On triple pay for Sunday work, Madola says: “For years we have given them three times the pay on Sundays; it should be one-and-a-half. It’s not right and it’s not fair and we have been trying to negotiate with them on this for years.”
Matshikiza denies any such negotiation or consultation over decreasing pay for overtime work or Sunday pay.