The twelve-week long Shoprite Checkers strike that reportedly closed six stores across the country came to an end on Thursday after all-night negotiations. But this strike was just one of several months-long strikes this year in the service industry, a sector of the economy that is experiencing the strongest employment growth and the weakest labour relations.
A three-month strike by the commercial and catering workers’ union Saccawu is dragging on at Karan Beef and the union also launched a strike at Sun International last month after four months of wage negotiations.
Earlier this year, the transport union Satawu, which also organises security guards and cleaners, held a three-month strike in the security industry and a two-month strike in the contract cleaning industry folded last week without an agreement.
“There has been a general upswing in vulnerable workers being very frustrated with the conditions that they are under,” said Rudi Dicks, labour policy analyst at Cosatu.
Vic van Vuuren, the chief operating officer of Business Unity South Africa (Busa), said relationships between business and organised labour in the service industry tended to lag behind other sectors. In the security industry, for example, he pointed out, employers were not organised into a national body before the strike.
The lack of processes to deal with industrial relations meant that the parties found it difficult to resolve situations where they hit an impasse, he said. Busa recognises the need to develop structures in the services industry to improve industrial relations, said Van Vuuren, and is currently working with the security industry in this regard.
The recent services strike wave represents an increase in industry-wide strikes over the past decade. Jackie Kelly of Andrew Levy Employment Publications said the number of strikes had declined in the past 10 years but more workers were actually striking because strikes were industry-wide.
One reason strikes dragged on was that unions had grown used to double-digit inflation in previous years and had yet to adjust their wage expectations to the reality of single-digit inflation.
The availability of replacement labour in industries such as security and cleaning also reduces a union’s leverage, she said.
Satawu researcher Jane Barrett said low margins in the service industry tend to make employers “cut throat” and more hostile to unions.
A source close to the contract cleaning negotiations said larger employers held out for longer so that smaller employers would go under. It was said that larger security companies used this strategy during Satawu’s security strike.
Another important dynamic is that union density is low in many of the service sectors. The National Labour and Economic Development Institute, a labour research body, found that union density was only 23% in wholesale and retail, 22% in finances and 15% in construction.
In industries with relatively low union density, the minister of labour issues a sectoral determination for minimum wages. This means that where negotiations do take place, they are voluntary, said Barrett.
The voluntary nature of negotiations shaped the outcome in the contract cleaning strike, where workers returned to work after two months without an agreement, because the union believed that it might get a better outcome from the minister’s wage determination.