Solidarity seeks approval for probe
• Court places bargaining body under administration
Trade Union Solidarity wants a forensic audit launched to probe the financial irregularities and maladministration that have crippled the Metal and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council.
Trade Union Solidarity wants a forensic audit launched to investigate financial irregularities and maladministration that are said to have crippled the Metal and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council.
On Tuesday, the Labour Court in Johannesburg granted the union’s application to have the council placed under administration following two years of irregularities that rendered its dispute-resolution function defunct. There is also a big backlog of disputes.
The council is the biggest in the manufacturing sector, responsible for labour relations and negotiations between 10,000 companies and more than 340,000 workers.
A former senior commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, Afzul Soobedaar, was appointed administrator.
Although Solidarity said that it would wait for the findings of the court-appointed administrator, it did not rule out the possibility of pursuing charges if any employee of the council had acted illegally.
Solidarity’s Marius Croucamp said: “We have to see the exact details of what happened in the different finance accounts of the council. Some of the things are known — the council lost some income in terms of fees when agreements stopped, but we have to look at all expenses that occurred.
“The bargaining council has not given in audited financial statements and accounts for the past two years, which is an irregularity,” he said.
Soobedaar has been mandated to put in place a business plan, budgets and other systems to put the council back on the path of solvency and ensure it fulfils its obligations under the Labour Relations Act.
The ruling by the court also set a precedent, raising questions about the state of other bargaining councils in SA.
The decision comes at the start of what is expected to be a tough wage-negotiations season in the engineering and metals sector, with the National Union of Metalworkers of SA’s 15% wage-increase demand already rejected by employers.
However, labour analyst Tony Healy said the decision to place the organisation under administration would not interfere with the wage negotiations.
If the process to rescue it failed, the consequences would be catastrophic for collective bargaining in the industry, he said. “Time will tell whether it can be rescued as a going concern. If it can’t, it will then be deregistered, there are far more serious implications in that scenario…. If they fold, one consequence would be that centralised bargaining becomes impossible,” said Healy.
Trade unions waged a fierce struggle with governments dating back to the apartheid era to have collective bargaining centralised across different industries. This was to ensure that workers received equal pay for work of equal value and transparency and cohesion in how working conditions were agreed on.
Healy said the ruling also raised questions on the viability and future of bargaining councils, a debate that had continued for some time now, after some sectors that included gold mining, chose to forego centralised bargaining.
What surprised Healy though, was that a council of this magnitude found itself in the position it did.
He warned that it might not be the only council in trouble.