Johannesburg | Monday
THE Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) this week launches its second stage of regional stayaways aimed at putting pressure on government to drop its privatisation programme.
The second set of regional stayaways will be in Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Free State on Tuesday.
The first stayaway was on Thursday last week in Gauteng, the Western Cape, the North West and the Northern Province. Both actions are part of Cosatu’s mobilisation for a two-day national strike on August 29 and 30.
On Sunday the SA Communist Party said it had decided to fully back the strike which ”is not about challenging or undermining the legitimacy of our ANC-led government”.
”We are seeking to defend and build a much stronger public and parastatal sphere, we want to broaden the public sphere, and limit the space in our society that is dominated by unelected, undemocratic profit-driven forces.”
The strike was also a fight against corruption and the abuse of office in the public sector, the SACP statement said.
”Many of the features of the current restructuring are fostering massive corruption.”
Cosatu officials and government ministers met on Saturday night but failed to come to any closer to an agreement on their differences over the government’s privatisation programme.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) will decide on Monday whether to issue their employers in the tyre and rubber industry with a strike notice, the union said on Sunday.
Numsa representative Dumisa Ntuli said they would be left with no other alternative than to down tools if the New Tyre Manufacturing Employers Association (NTMEA) did not up its wage increase offer.
This followed two days of mediation between Numsa, MWU-Solidarity and NTMEA on a wage increase dispute.
MWU-Solidarity wants an 8,5% pay rise and Numsa is demanding 10%.
The employers are offering an effective seven percent wage increase.
MWU-Solidarity representative Dirk Hermann said his union would only consider strike action once it had received feedback from the companies on its revised demands.
The union on Thursday tabled a revised demand to the mediator. It dropped its demands concerning benefits and was now concentrating only on pay rises.
Numsa is also demanding a two-year wage agreement, the merger of the auto and tyre sectors into a statutory council, and temporary workers to be made permanent employees. – Sapa