The biggest strike wave since the end of apartheid is causing a crisis in South African politics – and shaking a government that refuses to increase pay for millions of public sector workers.
Tag: unions
South Africa police fire on strikers
From Al-Jazeera:
Police fired stun grenades at striking workers, injuring at least one person, as South African civil servants launched a national strike demanding a pay rise from the government.
The powerful Cosatu labor federation, which had called on 700,000 public workers to strike on Friday, said the early turnout was a success.
Cement workers update
The early buy-out packages negotiations reached a dead end yesterday with militant trade unionists representing Suez, Tora and Helwan Cement workers rightly raising the ceiling of their demands to discourage the Italian management from cutting down the labor force in the company, following the December strikes.
The Factory Union Committee officials, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm, deliberately gave the management a set of high-ceiling demands they knew would be refused. While union officials played a sabotaging, pro-govt role in most of the current strikes, there are cases where few independent Factory Union Committees took the side of the workers, including the above mentioned cement companies.