Details

Monday, 16 July 2018 05:11

The Sunday Independent reports that SA Post Office (Sapo) workers have called on Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Siyabonga Cwele, to urgently intervene in their wage negotiations deadlock with the post office management.

On Saturday, Aubrey Tshabalala, Communication Workers Union (CWU) general secretary, said they had reached a deadlock in negotiations on Friday after his members rejected Sapo’s 6.5% increase offer.

The unions also want Sapo to identify several staff members, among its workforce, throughout the country, who will be dedicated to assisting social grant recipients with their payments.

Tshabalala said it was necessary to identify those workers after Sapo experienced technical glitches in paying grants to recipients.

“We call on the post office to resolve the matter. In our endeavour not to affect payments, the union chose not to go on a strike action on June 27 and July 2 to allow for smooth payment of social grants to recipients,” Tshabalala said.

He, however, added if Sapo bosses continue dragging their feet on negotiations, social grant payments would be affected.

On Thursday, however, Cwele and Sapo chief executive Mark Barnes expressed their confidence that the wage dispute would be amicably resolved.

They made a commitment to this on the sidelines of a government briefing on progress made to transfer social grant recipients to the new Sassa/ Sapo card.

Tshabalala said wage negotiations began on Thursday and Sapo initially offered a 6% increase from August 1. He added Sapo also offered to increase the working hours of its part-time workers from 21 hours a week to 25.

The union, according to Tshabalala, had demanded that those workers should be converted into permanent staff, saying most of them had been in their jobs for more than three months.

“We could not reach an agreement and postponed the meeting until Friday. Yesterday, the post office management arrived at the negotiations and made a new 6.5% increase offer, backdated to April this year.

“We rejected the new offer. The view of the workers was that they had initially demanded a 12% increase which was later reduced to 8% following protracted negotiations,” Tshabalala added.

He said they wanted Cwele to be part of their negotiations in the future.

“In 2015, Minister Cwele directly addressed workers and told them about the post office’s financial difficulties. As a result of that meeting, the workers agreed on a two-year zero-percent increase. We are now going to our third year. We want Minister Cwele to intervene. He is aware of the workers’ plight,” Tshabalala said.

The original of this report by Baldwin Ndaba appeared on page 2 of The Sunday Independent of 15 July 2018

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page

Details

Monday, 16 July 2018 03:15

Business Times writes that trade unions are fleecing their members, and the government is making it difficult to hold them accountable, says former labour registrar Johan Crouse, who was fired by the labour minister for trying to do just that.

The National Council of Trade Unions recently called on the government to hold the council's organisations accountable amid claims and proof of rampant corruption and maladministration in unions.

Crouse, who was the labour registrar for 20 years, says he has "absolutely no doubt" about these claims. But he says the call by union leaders for their organisations to be held accountable is "just rhetoric. They don't want to be held accountable, that's the bottom line."

He says he also finds it difficult to take seriously Cosatu president Sdumo Dlamini's recent remark about union investment companies being "a cancer ripping us all apart".

He agrees with him, but points out that it was Cosatu that got Labour Minister Mildred Oliphant to intervene when Crouse as labour regulator tried to enforce accountability on a Cosatu affiliate.

Cosatu, which was instrumental in setting up many of the union investment companies that union leaders have plundered, told the minister to reverse his court application to deregister the ANC-aligned Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union after it had failed to produce financial records for five years.

Regardless of Cosatu's public posturing, this demonstrates its real attitude to corruption, he says.

At stake was R6-billion worth of investments controlled by Ceppwawu. When Crouse refused Oliphant's instruction to suspend his court application to have it deregistered, she fired him in 2015.

After an almost two-year battle, the Labour Court found that her decision was "irrational and invalid" and ordered his reinstatement.

By then, he'd almost reached the official retirement age of 65 and didn't have time to reinstate the deregistration.

The result was that Ceppwawu was never deregistered, suspended or placed under administration, and still hasn't submitted proper financial statements.

When Crouse tried to deregister the union, it had been in contravention of the Labour Relations Act for five years.

Unions have constitutional checks and balances, but these are easily circumvented by strong leaders who run unions with a small clique of senior office bearers who are close to them, he says.

They are past masters at playing the system for their own ends, which rarely align with the interests of their members.

"You have these individuals who know the weaknesses of unions. They [prey] on these weaknesses and take over unions to get their hands on the bank accounts which they loot."

In addition to their "massive salaries", they usually have their eyes on what is considered to be the main prize, which is an investment company where there's a lot of money.

They will "usually do anything to be part of the decision-making in that investment company", he says.

As long as they've got a strong base, they can get away with anything. They don't have to worry about the branches.

"I can assure you members have got very little say in their unions," says Crouse.

Only the "right" shop stewards and other members are invited to meetings.

"They hear about decisions at meetings to which they weren't invited."

Members from branches would complain to him in strict confidence that meetings were held without them even knowing.

"They are usually so scared of the consequences if they tackle the legitimacy of decisions that they'd rather just join another union."

It is extremely difficult for the registrar to check that decisions made are valid, he says.

It was Ceppwawu's inability to prove that it held the meetings required of a registered union that, along with its failure to produce financial records, made him seek to put it under administration, and cost him his job.

"It's a minefield. The system is ripe to be taken by anyone who knows the system."

The registrar is supposed to see that there is proper financial control, "but you are hamstrung".

All he has to go on are the financial statements, where these exist. Many unions don't submit financials as they are obliged to do by law.

Where financial statements are available, they're often entirely inadequate.

"The auditors just sign off on a lot of things. They do the basic checks and balances but don't ask the questions."

In effect, they facilitate corruption because they're not doing a proper job, he says.

The now-disgraced audit firm KPMG looked after Ceppwawu's books.

Crouse said he saw comments by Ceppwawu investment company's lawyers where they said auditors had signed off on things they were not supposed to sign off on.

When he brought his urgent application, Labour Court judges were scathing about what they saw and said the matter needed to go to court.

But after he was pushed out by the minister, the acting registrar withdrew the application, and it never went to court.

Political interference in the work of the labour regulator has become "the standard, the norm", says Crouse.

"It can happen that you put a union under administration or cancel its registration, which makes big problems in the alliance."

Deregistering Ceppwawu would have weakened Cosatu and the governing alliance politically and financially.

"Unions pay massive affiliation fees to Cosatu, which is one of the machines of the government and ANC in elections.

"So the registrar now first has to check with the minister."

What came out in his Labour Court case was that the registrar is empowered by the Labour Relations Act to act independently of the minister or Department of Labour.

But he says the department has been restructured "so that the link of the registrar to the minister and director-general is more direct than in the past".

"The registrar now reports to the DG or minister."

The oversight and monitoring role of the registrar has been blunted, making it easier for corruption in the unions to flourish, says Crouse.

Read the original of this Business Times report by Chris Barron at BL Premium

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page

Details

Saturday, 14 July 2018 08:15

Mail & Guardian reports that Associated Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) president Joseph Mathunjwa has executed another big purge within his union and is intent on ousting his deputy, Sanele Myeza, as the battle for control of the union heats up, and regions in Gauteng and Mpumalanga prepare to take him on.

Amcu currently has 250000 members and represents the majority of workers in the platinum and coal mining sectors. In the gold sector, it is the second-biggest union behind the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). But Amcu has been plagued by internal squabbles about transparency and an apparently dictatorial style of leadership by the charismatic Mathunjwa.

The union has failed to hold an elective congress since it rose to prominence in the wake of the sixweek long strike at Lonmin platinum and the Marikana massacre in 2012, during which 44 people were killed.

Myeza last week told the Mail & Guardian that his status within Amcu is a “very sensitive matter ,” but wouldn’t comment further on the dismissal of his allies within the union.

The former Amcu deputy had started gaining support among Amcu regions to challenge Mathunjwa for the leadership of the union and now faces the axe, according to Amcu insiders. By this week, his picture and details had been removed from the official Amcu website.

The union’s general secretary, Jeff Mphahlele, was sent detailed questions about the dismissals, but only said that the claims were “erroneous and false”. Instead, Mphahlele laid a complaint with the M&G about the writer’s apparent personal vendetta against Mathunjwa.

Mathunjwa was supposed to convene a national congress that would hold leadership elections in May but postponed it to September. Now that gathering has also been scrapped and union officials who oppose the Amcu leader have been purged.

These include Mpumalanga’s regional organiser, John Tlou, and head office organiser Thomas Nkosi. In Gauteng, Mathunjwa sacked Desmond Jeza and Ernest Mohale, regional organisers in Carletonville, and Sibongile Tshisa, the chairperson of the union’s West Rand region.

The reasons for the officials’ dismissals put forward by Amcu range from not servicing members correctly and their poor management of work stoppages to officials losing their jobs, making them ineligible to be worker representatives.

Tshisa described Mathunjwa as paranoid, and said he would protect his control over Amcu at any cost. “The real problem was that we wanted a national conference. There was a conference which was not completed in 2012, and a promise was made that a special congress was to be called, but it hasn’t been,” he said.

“The president himself felt threatened that we wanted to unseat him, Myeza and I, because we know each other. He felt insecure and was paranoid because he doesn’t want anyone who opposes him,” Tshisa added.

According to Jeza, Mathunjwa started targeting his opponents in the union late last year, when it became evident the officials in the regions were unhappy with what they saw as his unilateral decisionmaking and his lack of transparency.

Jeza was dismissed for rendering poor service to members in 2013 and 2014, but the charges were only brought in December 2017.

“These people have cooked up stories against [me] such as misconduct. They said I never served the workers,” he said. Jeza was furious about his dismissal and decided to take Amcu to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration.

“We settled at the CCMA for three months’ salary, because they could see they didn’t have a case against me,” he said.

Then, in January, Mohale and Amcu paralegal officer Vusi Shonge resigned — they said it was constructive dismissal — after they were accused of inadequately managing a work stoppage in Carletonville. At the end of January, Tshisa was sacked after he lost his job at Harmony Gold’s Kusasalethu mine.

His departure from Harmony Gold left the workers at Kusasalethu confused, Tshisa said.

At least three Amcu members at the mine confirmed that Mathunjwa had visited the shaft twice since dismissing Tshisa, but said he did not properly explain why the decision was made.

“The president came here twice to assassinate Tshisa’s character, and said he was sleeping with Amcu leaders and his wife is recruiting for Numsa [the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa],” a rock drill operator at Kusasalethu said anonymously, fearing victimisation for speaking out against Mathunjwa.

“A number of our comrades have now left Amcu for Numsa and NUM,” he said.

Tshisa’s dismissal letter from the Amcu head office states that he was sacked because the union’s constitution requires that, for a member to be eligible for an elected position, he or she must be an employee of a mining or construction company and contribute a monthly subscription from his or her salary.

But this clause would mean that Mathunjwa himself would be ineligible to serve as president, former registrar of labour Johan Crouse told the M&G.

Mathunjwa and Amcu treasurer Jimmy Gama accepted retrenchment packages from BHP Billiton in 2014, and are currently serving as full-time paid officials of the union.

Crouse said he wrote to Mathunjwa in 2016, seeking clarity on why he continued to occupy the position of president despite the provisions of the Amcu constitution, but was ignored.

“This guy has, at least for the past five years, been ignoring us straight,” Crouse said.

“It is an illegitimate union and it is not operating constitutionally. It has been established and is being run by people who cannot call themselves legitimate office bearers.”

He explained that, technically, Amcu is not a worker-controlled union, because its top leadership was not elected by any of its members.

“They all wanted to be office bearers but I said that they can’t, because the provisions of the constitution say, once you become elected to the committee as an office bearer, you immediately become a paid official of the union,” Crouse explained.

Before he was ousted in a controversial public spat with the minister of labour, Crouse intended to confront Mathunjwa about his failure to convene a conference and submit the names of elected officials.

“They don’t submit the names of the committees or elected positions. You hear there was an election [in 2012] but they say we didn’t have that election; it was abandoned,” he said.

This week the department of labour confirmed that Mathunjwa had still not responded to the letter and remains solely employed by the union.

The original of this report by Govan Whittles appeared on page 8 of Mail & Guardian of 13 July 2018

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page

Details

Wednesday, 11 July 2018 07:54

BL Premium reports that the last thing investors in SA’s troubled gold mining shares need are protracted, uncertain wage talks, culminating in a strike or a settlement that squeezes narrow profit margins at a time when the rand gold price is subdued.

Analysts speaking about the mining sector point to a series of above-inflation wage increases and cripplingly high electricity price increases as the two major factors inhibiting the industry.

For SA’s gold mines these two issues are most heavily felt. The mines are labour intensive, requiring large numbers of people in narrow working areas using brute force to drill and extract ore. They are also among the world’s deepest, needing high levels of refrigeration and ventilation, both of which use large amounts of electricity.

SA’s mines are, by and large, old, with working areas drifting further and further away from the shafts that lower employees into the earth. Over the years, combined with falling grades of gold, this has meant productivity has fallen.

The gold sector is not attractive for investors anymore.

So far in 2018, the JSE gold index has fallen a chunky 18%, with the big faller being Sibanye-Stillwater, which is by far the most dangerous gold company to work for in 2018, with 21 people killed at its operations, making up nearly half of the 46 people who have died on South African mines in 2018.

AngloGold Ashanti, the world’s third-largest gold producer, has cut its exposure to SA to a single underground mine and a tailings retreatment business, drawing a firm line under its historical base as it looks for growth abroad in shallower, cheaper, safer mines.

There is a reality at play that the well-intentioned demands from four unions may well run up against in this round of wage talks. The gold sector is in deep trouble and unrealistic demands, if implemented, could bring its demise forward.

Read the original of this report at BL Premium (paywall access)

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page

Details

Thursday, 05 July 2018 12:13

Business Report writes that Naspers chief executive Bob van Dijk has been given an option to buy R196 million in shares at a fixed price of R3 207 a share, the closing price on June 25, over a period of four years.

The move is seen as an incentive to keep Van Dijk as the chief executive of the group, which has a market capitalisation of about R1.5 trillion.

Van Dijk can buy the stock in four instalments from June 2019 to June 2022, regardless of the share price on those dates.

Naspers shares closed 0.2 percent lower on the JSE yesterday, at R3 408 a share, compared with Tuesday’s closing price of R3 415 a share.

In the results for the year to the end of March, the group reported a 38 percent increase year-on-year in revenues, measured on an economic interest basis, including the proportionate contribution from associates and joint ventures, to $20.1 billion (R275.98bn).

Core headline earnings grew 72 percent to $2.5bn.

The group said businesses outside South Africa contributed 84 percent of revenue, compared with 80 percent last year.

Naspers chairperson Koos Bekker said during the results presentation that the group had made good progress during the year.

“Financial performance was strong. Growth in both revenue and trading profit accelerated. We benefited from scale effects in e-commerce and a positive contribution from Tencent. Video entertainment’s results were steady,” Bekker said.

In the year ahead, the group said it would use its strong balance sheet to accelerate the growth of its classifieds, food delivery and financial technology businesses globally.

Naspers operates in more than 120 countries and markets, resulting in significant exposure to foreign exchange volatility.

The group is also the owner of Africa’s biggest pay-TV provider, and it has a number of investments in internet and technology stocks around the world.

The original of this report by Sandile Mchunu appeared on page 19 of Business Report of 5 July 2018

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page