Negotiations to settle the countrywide strike by 950 baggage handlers reached crisis point this week as the workers’ employer and their trade union again clashed.
On Monday Equity Aviation Services, a private baggage handler contracted by, among other companies, SAA, gave the striking workers an ultimatum to return to work by 5pm and accept its conditions of employment.
The workers, represented by the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), refused and Equity issued a lockout order. This week the strike entered its eighth week.
Now Equity is consulting with its lawyers and Satawu has issued a secondary strike notice to SAA, Airports Company South Africa and South African Express workers to join them in a march to the Transnet head office next Thursday. The Congress of South African Trade Unions has expressed its solidarity with the workers.
Equity was formed at the beginning of last year when British multinational service giant Serco and a local black economic empowerment consortium, Equity Alliance, bought a 51% share of the previous state-owned Apron Services from Transnet.
The Mail & Guardian reported three weeks ago that Equity is offering a 0,5% wage increase conditional on an increase in the working week from 40 hours to 45 hours. Satawu is demanding an 8% wage increase without the ”downward variation” of employment conditions, said the union’s general secretary, Randall Howard.
”Next week we will start talking to directors and the shareholders of Equity. We do not believe that any empowerment shareholder … will accept the way [Equity is] negotiating,” said Howard.
He said the memorandum that Satawu hands over to Transnet on Thursday will include the demand that the state company again become the majority shareholder of Equity.
Herman Fleischman, spokesperson for Equity Aviation, said: ”It will never be our intention to undermine the union, but we have passed the negotiation phase and it is time to make decisions. The strike was called by the union and they have left us little choice but to [keep the workers locked out].”
Last week, mediation between the two parties conducted by the director of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, Edwin Molahlehi, failed.