Member Country News
South African unions turned down a revised offer of a 7.5 percent pay rise on Friday (22 June), ensuring that the country’s biggest strike since the end of apartheid will go into a fourth week.
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The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) said it was unable “at this stage” to sign up to the package which Public Services and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said would remain open for another month.
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“The majority of public service unions agreed that they cannot at this stage sign any agreement with the employer,” said COSATU in a statement after the latest round of talks broke up.
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“The unions will meet again on Sunday 24 June” to discuss their next move, the statement added.
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The talks in Centurion, on the outskirts of the capital Pretoria, lasted little over an hour and their failure appeared to dash hopes of a breakthrough, although Fraser-Moleketi insisted that all was not lost.
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“It’s up to the unions. The government has definitely shown that we are very patient in this process,” she said on 702 Eyewitness News radio.
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“We have signed the offer, it’s on the table and the union leadership and negotiators need to ensure that they take the ball forward and they need to sign when they are ready.”
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Unions had been angered by an earlier warning from the government to accept the offer by the end of last Wednesday, but the minister signalled that she was now prepared to wait for a final answer for another 21 working days.
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“But I trust and I am quite confident that it will happen much sooner because there are signals that there are number of unions that are ready to sign,” she added.
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Asked what would happen should the unions refuse to sign the agreement, Fraser-Moleketi said: “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
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Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers embarked on a strike on June 1 in what has become the biggest and most protracted strike in South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994.
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The industrial action has led to the closure of most schools while hospitals have only been able to run skeleton services with the help of army medics.
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The unions had initially demanded a 12 percent pay rise but have since indicated that they would be prepared to settle for less than nine percent