South Africa could experience a total economic shutdown on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands more public-sector workers join an ongoing strike in a pay dispute, labour unions warned on Tuesday.
”It’s going to be a total shutdown tomorrow [Wednesday] in public services and the economy. It’s going be a massive strike involving marches in major cities and pickets outside government buildings,” said Willie Madisha, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
His warning came after union and government negotiators failed to break a deadlock in a new round of pay talks and a raft of other unions prepared to join the industrial action.
Cosatu predicted that a total of two million workers would take part in the strike as of Wednesday, with municipal workers and some police personnel set to join their colleagues who first downed tools on June 1.
The unions are demanding 10% increases.
”We have unanimously decided not to agree to the reshuffling of the offer in the form of a proposal for a 7,25% wage increase for public servants, which has been brokered by the mediators,” Madisha told reporters in Centurion, on of Pretoria.
Meanwhile, security in ports and jails was expected to be compromised as some soldiers and police officers joined in the strike.
South African Police Union general secretary Les Maseng told Agence France-Presse some of their members would join the strike while soldiers, whose colleagues are being used as reserve labour in hospitals, would picket outside Parliament.
Madisha said regardless of the ”unfortunate” situation, they still hoped a solution would be found to end the impasse.
But he said progress could be hampered by the government’s decision to dismiss thousands of striking healthcare workers who refused to heed a court order to return to work last week.
The strike has turned into the most widespread and bitter industrial action since the end of the apartheid era 13 years ago.
However, despite the apparent gulf between the government and unions, South African President Thabo Mbeki expressed confidence on Tuesday that the dispute could soon be resolved.
”I would like to reiterate our confidence that in time, the government as employer and the public-service unions will find one another and bring to a conclusion the current negotiations,” Mbeki told lawmakers in Cape Town.
The government wanted to ”realise a wage settlement that improves the salaries of employees, ensures appropriate reward for good performance and acknowledges the unique contribution of public professionals, and is at the same time affordable and therefore sustainable”, he added.
Mbeki also called for an end to the use of violence and intimidation by union hardliners following reports of attacks on teachers and health workers who have tried to go to work.
”All of us should ask ourselves what kind of society we are building and what moral lessons we are imparting when insults, violence against fellow workers and damage to property become the stock-in-trade during protests of this kind,” he said.
Meanwhile, Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said the government was putting contingency measures in place to reduce the impact of Wednesday’s action.
”In the event that it does happen we have taken contingency measures to make sure that hospitals and schools are secure,” she told a media briefing in Johannesburg. — AFP, Sapa