Pretoria - The SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) has spurned calls by Zwelinzima Vavi of Saftu for it to boycott the signing of the 7.5% wage increase offer with the government tomorrow.
Sadtu’s latest reaction looks set to create more tensions among Cosatu-aligned unions such as Nehawu, Denosa and Popcru who were also rejecting the wage increase offer.
The settlement deal is expected to be implemented in July, but threats of a boycott look set to disturb the signing of the deal.
Yesterday, Saftu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said his union was disappointed to learn that the public service unions that comprise about 53.9% of the vote-weight in the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council would accept the wage offer.
Vavi said the wage offer was being misrepresented as a 7.5% wage increment, without explaining to workers the intricacies surrounding it. Saftu maintained that talk of the wage offer as a 7.5% wage increase was a fallacy engineered to deceive public servants, while helping Treasury meet its fiscal consolidation plans for the medium-term expenditure framework.
Sadtu national spokesperson Nomusa Cembi said: “Sadtu takes her line of march from members. We refuse to be bullied by forces we are not aligned to.”
Fedusa – who together with Sadtu – form 53% of majority unions in support of the wage offer – did not want to comment on Saftu’s call.
Despite the rejection of their call, Vavi insisted that the deal would not improve the living standards of public servants.
“It is important to explain the intricacies to unmask the misleading presentation … In this wage offer for 2023/24, the government is tabling a 3% as a new offer. The 4.5% is merely a carry-over of the cash gratuity paid to workers since 2021.
“The only difference now is that it is being translated from a non-pensionable cash-gratuity into a pensionable salary on the baseline. In the revised draft agreement presented to unions in the PSCBC, the government explicitly admits this.
“However, it mischievously, and disappointingly joined by majority unions, misrepresents this to public servants and the general public as a 7.5%,” Vavi said.
In the past, they had argued that workers must reject the cash-gratuity, primarily because it was stalling the wage increases for a multi-term period, and secondarily because it was inflicting losses on the pensions of workers, he said.
“Today the fight is over what this 4.5% means in reality. Having never factored in the cash gratuity as part of the baseline increase, the government wants to argue that it is a new increase. But in reality, the 4.5% part of the tabled increase is a recycling of the cash gratuity and not a new offer.
“Though this increase will now begin to improve pension contributions, the blows inflicted on the buying power of the salaries of public servants will continue to have a dire impact on those workers and their households to afford the necessaries of life,” he said.
Vavi said the cost of living continues to rise, with headline inflation seemingly returning to the margins of late last year; in February, headline inflation rose back to 7%, with food inflation is still hovering above 13%.
According to Vavi, with this increase, the buying power would just increase by 3%, that was about 3.1% below the projected CPI average for the year.
“Over the past three years, public service workers have declined in real terms by 11.2%, and if the wage offer is accepted as is, workers will lose a further 3.1% of the buying power of their wages. In aggregate, workers would have lost a cumulative 14.3% in real wages over the four year period since 2020. It is in this context that Saftu supports the minority unions rejecting this offer.”
Pretoria News