United Transport and Allied Trade Union (Utatu) members have rejected a Transnet wage-increase offer of 11%, and have elected to embark on an indefinite strike against that company.
“We, Utatu, are now officially on strike action,” said Louis Brockett on Tuesday, deputy general secretary of Utatu, adding that 95% of its members rejected Transnet’s offer.
He said its strike action will take off formally at 6am on Wednesday.
Utatu rejoins the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) after it earlier halted industrial action to review Transnet’s increased offer of 11% over the weekend. Initially, Transnet had offered 8%, whereas the two unions demanded 15% across the board.
Satawu’s members have been on strike since Monday, and together the unions make up 85% of the about 50 000 Transnet workers now on strike.
Policy research officer at Satawu Jane Barrett said Utatu’s decision “means that the strike will be absolutely solid, we expect that by tonight [Tuesday] Transnet operations will have completely shut down”.
Despite the informal discussions between management and unions, Barrett said: “We hope that we can agree with management that they can meet with the negotiation team by tomorrow [Wednesday] to reach a settlement,” adding that, “We’ve always said our 15% is negotiable.”
Describing the industrial action so far, she said: “Workers are resolute, they are standing firm. There’s a lot of unity, and now that Utatu has officially come out, there’ll be more unity. We’ve had one regrettable incident of violence in Durban and we’ve taken steps to ensure that that doesn’t happen again; it’s definitely not in our interest.”
The strike action involves workers employed at all of the country’s commercial ports, the national rail network, rail engineering operations, as well as at the national pipeline.
Workers are striking against wages and unsatisfactory working conditions.