The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) said it was planning to go on a wage strike in the engineering sector.
Negotiations between trade unions and employers in the metals and engineering sector have reached a deadlock and mutual disputes were declared on May 29.
The disputes – declared first by the unions and followed by employers, mark the beginning of a series of intensive talks over the next month in the Metal and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council (MEIBC).
A meeting of the MEIBC management committee recently took place where unions presented employers with a consolidated list of 38 demands, which include a 20% wage increase.
Employers, who entered the negotiations with their own set of demands, offered an inflation-linked increase on the cost of employment over the next three years. The inflation-linked offer for 2014 is 6.1%.
Although four of the unions opened with a 15% wage demand, they subsequently consolidated their demands and settled on the 20% stipulated by the other two unions.
Before their recent declaration of a dispute, the unions reduced their wage demand to 15%.
“Our approach to the negotiations has been informed by the need to maintain existing jobs and to create new ones. We are concerned that our economy has not performed well in recent years, with the metals and engineering industry being among the sectors most threatened by cheap imports,” said Kaizer Nyatsumba, the CEO of the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (Seifsa).
Nyatsumba added that employers hoped that it would be possible for the two parties to reach a settlement in June in order to avoid the possibility of a strike, which the ailing industry could ill afford.
Nyatsumba reconfirmed employers’ commitment to collective bargaining and reiterated their position, articulated throughout the negotiations, that they would not sign any agreement that did not address their concerns around the two-tier bargaining over the same issues.
He said that associations federated to Seifsa remained firmly of the view that a solution to be found to the threat posed by recent labour court judgements to the collective bargaining process.
The facilitated negotiations started with the pre-bargaining conference at the end of March and went on until the end of May.
More dates for negotiations have been allocated between Seifsa and Numsa and will continue until June 25, to try and resolve the dispute.
Hopefully the dispute will be resolved before the end of these dates and an agreement reached to prevent the strike.
