Wage talks a tester for “new dawn”

The government and public sector unions look set for a head-on collision over wage negotiations.

The biggest union in the sector, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union, is planning a picket outside the offices of the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council in Midrand today.

The protest has been prompted by the union’s frustration with what they see as delaying tactics on the side of the Department of Public Administration, which negotiates salaries on behalf of the government.

Other non-Cosatu unions operating in the public sector also unhappy, accusing the government of frustrating efforts to cut a deal.

Ideally, the wage negotiations should have been finalised long ago so that a new salary structure would have kicked in on April 1, the government’s new financial year.

However, such is the state of the economy and the state’s dwindling coffers that it has been almost impossible for the parties to reach an agreement on time.

Yet the unions are not likely to have sympathy for the state – not while the workers are feeling the pinch of a rising cost of living and sluggish economic growth.

For Cosatu affiliates, the talks comes at a time when it is facing fierce competition from rivals gunning for its members by painting the ANC-aligned federation as being more loyal to government than workers.

Therefore these affiliates are unlikely to easily agree to what government proposes.

From this perspective, it looks highly likely that the country may witness a public sector strike soon.

In a sense, the negotiations are a litmus test for President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new administration. One of its immediate tasks is to avoid government spending spiralling out of control. Raising the salaries of an already burgeoning civil service above inflation would do exactly that. Yet that is precisely what the unions are demanding.

The dilemma demonstrates the urgent need for Ramaphosa’s mooted social compact that seeks a buy-in from all key stakeholders: government, business, labour and civil society. With such a social compact it would be easier to settle issues such as wage disputes as everybody would be working on the basis of agreed-to principles and strategic objectives for the country.