A mechanism to force security-sector groups into negotiating is needed to resolve the current labour dispute, Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana said on Monday.
”People are constantly calling on the minister to intervene in criminal activities. What do they mean when they say intervene? The only problem we have is the flexibility of the law,” Mdladlana said to journalists in Pretoria.
He was responding to perceptions that neither he nor his department is intervening in the labour dispute between the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) and security-sector employers.
”We have been urging and waiting for the parties to come to the table and negotiate,” Mdladlana said.
The minister added that the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, which falls under the ambit of the department, is one of the department’s interventions in the dispute and it is costing both the department and taxpayers substantial amounts of money when it is being forced to wait for voluntary involvement in negotiations.
”We need some mechanism to force the parties to negotiate. South Africans may now realise that the law is so flexible that the minister is now complaining.”
Earlier in the day, union leaders indicated the strike is set to continue with secondary strikes intensifying the campaign.
National security-industry coordinator Jackson Simon said the union’s top management would meet on Monday afternoon to discuss the involvement of other union members in other industries. ”We will be calling on our members in other industries to join the security guards in secondary strikes,” Simon said. ”We will discuss it this afternoon [Monday].”
Meanwhile, the South African National Security Employers’ Association said it would ask Mdladlana to institute an investigation by the Employment Conditions Commission into the security industry.
At the meeting in Pretoria, the minister said he had not been made aware of this request for an investigation and took the opportunity to chide parties involved in the strike for speaking to him through the media, instead of directly.
Mdladlana said he cannot simply decide to launch such an investigation without the involvement of majority stakeholders in the industry.
The minister said of the 211 000 registered security employees, less than 30% are represented by Satawu and the 14 unions that have accepted the employer’s 8% wage-increase offer. Satawu is demanding 11%.
”In order to have clout in any bargaining system, we need to have a representation of 50 plus 1% of the sector. The majority of security-sector workers are not unionists.
”What we would have done [if that were the case] is have them sit and negotiate and come to an agreement that an investigation into the sector be launched,” said the minister.
He said investigation would then commence and its findings brought to the Employment Conditions Commission, which would then decide whether to conduct its own investigation, formulate a report and advise the minister of its findings. — Sapa