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TechnoratiUnions call off power strike
South African labour unions called off a strike at Eskom, the state-owned electricity firm, on Sunday, after their employer offered a nine percent wage increase.The move averted a potential nationwide strike in the last days of the World Cup. The new offer came in talks over the weekend between the power firm and Solidarity, the National Union of Mineworkers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa).
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"It's the first time in the whole negotiation process that the offer is of such a nature that trade union leaders have the confidence in it," Dirk Hermann, deputy general secretary of the union Solidarity, told RFI.
Eskom said power was an essential service and that it would be illegal to strike, threatening to punish striking workers.
"We are not in a position to support an illegal strike," said Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim. "We think that it is a very serious offer and ask our members to seriously review it," he added.
But Hermann told RFI that Eskom executives complicated the negotiation process by not originally granting pay raises. "Eskom top executives awarded themselves, in the last year, an 83 per cent pay raise, and that of course put a lot of pressure on the negotiation process," he said.
"The workers said 'you've just awarded yourselves ten times more than we've asked.' We think that was very insensitive," he said, "not only to the workers, but to South Africa."
He explained how South Africans were paying high increases in electricity tarifs, more than 30 per cent per year for the next three years.
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