Members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) began a wage strike at mining recruitment company Teba Limited on Monday.
The strike comes after negotiations, initiated in October last year, reached a deadlock in November, with the union’s basic wage demand at 13 per cent and the company’s offer at five per cent.
The NUM and Teba then failed to reach an agreement at negotiations chaired by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration in early December, and a certificate of non-resolution was issued.
Teba said that the union submitted a revised demand on December 22, for an 8.5 per cent basic wage increase with a deadline of December 28, but then issued its strike notice before the deadline.
However, NUM spokesperson Lesiba Seshoka explained to Mining Weekly Online that the union decided to issue the strike notice a day before the deadline, as it was ‘apparent’ that the company remained reluctant to meet the union’s demands.
‘We have been negotiating with these people for a very long time and no agreement has been reached to date.
‘The ball is now in their court, but the union’s door will remain open and we are ready for any further talks,’ said Seshoka.
Teba supplies the South African mining industry with recruitment, social, financial and employment services.
Teba has claimed that the NUM represents just 186 of the company’s total workforce of 503.
Human resources services manager Bernadet Botha alleged that only 61 employees were striking on Monday and claimed: ‘We have arranged for replacement labour, and operations had not been affected at all.’
However, Lesiba Seshoka rebutted the claim, insisting: ‘That is not true. We represent the total workforce.
‘The total workforce is on strike except for management.’
Seshoka said that the other main demand of the striking workers concerns the minimum wage.
‘The minimum wage is currently just 1,000 rand. We want the minimum wage to be 1,500 rand,’ Seshoka said.
There was mass strike action over wages and in favour of an increase in the South African minimum wage throughout last year.
Some unions have already warned that they will not back down during 2011 wage negotiations.
Schools, hospitals and other government services, as well as the manufacturing sector and municipal services all saw strike action for weeks and months last year.
In April 2010, 60,000 workers took part in the municipal strike nationwide.
In May the three-week long Transnet industrial action diminished port and railway operations throughout the country and goods perished as they awaited export.
The strike was estimated to be costing the South African economy between R300million and R500million a day.
In June, during the Fifa Soccer World Cup, stadium security guards took strike action in their fight for a wage increase and police took over security services at affected stadiums.
In August thousands of public servants took to the streets, with teachers and nurses taking strike action in schools and hospitals.
Court interdicts were taken out to prevent police, soldiers and nurses from joining the strike action.
The motor industry saw workers at petrol stations, workshops and dealerships going on strike in September.
This came after the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa deadlocked with employer bodies the Retailers Motor Industry and Fuel Retailers Association.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA has warned employers in the engineering sector to prepare for a ‘war’ in wage negotiations this year.
Meanwhile, amendments to labour laws which could see the banning of labour broking, are being supported by the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu).
Cosatu says labour broking is a new form of slavery and needs to be banned completely.
Cosatu says a survey shows there are nearly 100,000 more labour broker workers than previously estimated and they now represent 6.8 per cent of total employment in SA and 23.2 per cent of the country’s temporary and part-time workforce.
‘This is having a devastating negative effect on the levels of pay, job security and benefits for thousands of workers,’ says a Cosatu statement.
Welcoming the draft amendments, Cosatu said: ‘We are studying all of them to satisfy ourselves that they deliver only one outcome: doing away with the third man in the relationship that should exist between a worker and the employer.
‘We want a total ban of the system that has condemned so many to new slavery by what has become to be known as human traffickers.’
Cosatu says it is ready to mobilise all genuine workers’ organisations and the poor in defence of the decent work agenda, which cannot live side-by-side with labour broking.
‘We call on workers to use their rest to re-energise themselves and be ready for a mother of all battles in 2011.’
The labour relations amendment bill recalls Section 198 of the original act, which the department said created confusion that was exploited by labour brokers.
The public employment service bill takes the matter further by banning temporary employment agencies from being the employers of the workers they recruit and place with third party companies.
Thembinkosi Mkalipi, the labour department’s chief director of labour relations, said the new legislation stated clearly that the company was the primary employer and bore the normal obligations regarding wages and other conditions of employment.
He said it was ‘not really’, as some commentators have suggested, a ban on labour broking but rather a concerted bid to regulate recruitment and placement.
‘It creates a new definition of employer. The definition restricts labour brokers to placement. There is really not a difference (between broking and placement) at all. Some brokers only do placement. It is one and the same thing.’
Illustrating how the bill intends to regulate the three-way relationship created by placement, he said:
‘The SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation), for example, can have workers from a placement agency, they cannot have the placement agency be the employer of those workers.’
Cosatu said it is not denouncing the government’s new draft labour legislation but bracing for a fight with labour brokers and employers intent on resisting regulation.
Cosatu trade federation leader Zwelinzima Vavi said his call for a ban on broking should not be seen as a challenge to the labour department’s proposed new labour legislation published for public comment last week that stops short of an outright ban.
‘No, not at all. We have not said that the amendments don’t adequately protect workers.
‘We have not rejected it. We must still study the document.
‘We must make sure that there are no loopholes,’ Vavi said.
Vavi set out a position similar to that of the department, saying he had no objection to properly regulated temporary employment placement.
‘Temporary employment will always be part of the economy.
‘We are not fighting against employers who for their own organisational reasons need temporary labour, those on farms, in the manufacturing industry.
‘Even in the unions, if somebody is on maternity leave, we need to find a replacement.
‘So we are not opposed to placement agencies, but we are saying that is where it should end.
‘What we have a problem with is where somebody is in temporary employment for 20 years and we have not regulated the relationship between the worker and the person who has employed him from the boot of a car,’ Vavi said.