The Johannesburg Labour Court on Thursday reserved judgement on whether South African Police Service (SAPS) members could join the public-service strike.
Arguments by the lawyers for the police and the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) centred largely on whether SAPS administration and support staff were essential-service workers or not.
Judge AJ Ngalwana is expected to pass judgement on Friday morning.
The Labour Court issued an interim interdict last Friday prohibiting members of Popcru from taking part in the industrial action.
It also ordered Popcru not to promote police involvement in the strike, which has highlighted divisions between the African National Congress (ANC) and its powerful trade union allies.
The government and union negotiators have postponed until Friday talks aimed at ending the strike to enable labour to consult members, officials said on Wednesday.
Popcru has close to 120 000 members, the majority of whom are uniformed police officers.
The mass action that began on June 1 has crippled some state institutions, such as hospitals and schools, and support by Popcru would pile pressure on President Thabo Mbeki, whom unions accuse of promoting big business and leaving behind millions of poor South Africans.
Hundreds of thousands of workers have taken part in the strike, which analysts say has become a demonstration of workers’ power ahead of a leadership congress this year that may see the ANC name a successor to Mbeki.
Popcru had planned to start marches and picketing on Thursday in support of the countrywide strike over better wages.
Should Popcru go ahead, the demonstrations would be conducted by off-duty officers as well as the union’s estimated 15 000 civilian support staff.
Succession battle
Meanwhile, the current public-service wage dispute had nothing to do with the ANC succession battle, the South African Communist Party said this week.
General secretary Blade Nzimande said there were some ”key underlying issues” in the dispute but that it had nothing to do with the succession battle.
”The strike is a ‘normal’ employer-employee dispute, but simultaneously [it is] about deeper class and ideological struggles in the state and the economy,” he wrote in his party’s Umsebenzi Online magazine.
The wage dispute exposed the limitations of economic policies based on inflation targeting, lowering the cost of doing business and the restoration of capitalist profitability.
Nzimande described the working conditions of public servants as ”appalling”.
”Whilst many of these conditions were inherited from apartheid, we believe that there have been unsatisfactory responses to these [conditions].”
This, he said, was mainly because of the contradictory economic policies followed by government since 1996. — Sapa, Reuters