Workers at Lear Corporation — a vehicle components firm in Pretoria — will strike after 300 union members were retrenched, the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) said on Wednesday.
Numsa spokesperson Mziwakhe Hlangani said Lear Corporation — a car interior system and global components company — had retrenched 300 workers at its Rosslyn plant in Pretoria last month even though the union had agreed to exempt the company from a proposed 5% wage increase in minimum wages.
Hlangani said Numsa had also agreed to allow the company to reduce their members’ salaries to a minimum wage of R12 an hour.
The 5% increase would have seen workers earn a minimum wage of R23,85 an hour.
”We exempted them from implementing the 5% wage increase which would have seen workers earn R23,85 [in minimum wages] and agreed on a very low R12 an hour wage as the company told us that they were going through some financial difficulties. Yet they still went ahead and retrenched our members.”
He said the company had announced that it would retrench another 200 workers in June.
”This is a classic case of discrimination and mismanagement against our members because the company continues to hire new contract workers and employees in the management structures while retrenching lowly paid workers,” said Hlangani. – Sapa