Securing the public sector wage deal was no easy feat, and the result is a finely balanced compromise between parties.
Make no mistake, the National Treasury balked at the idea of a 1.5% increase and a R1,000 per month sweetener for most of the country’s 1.3-million public servants, which will automatically be extended beyond the one-year duration of the deal, should a new agreement not be reached by July next year.
But finance minister Tito Mboweni is understood to have been outnumbered during the cabinet meeting discussing the mechanics of the deal.
Basic education minister Angie Motshekga, for instance, came out strongly, arguing that the education sector is already in crisis due to the pandemic and a strike would bring it to its knees.
Ministers who argued strongly in favour of the deal included employment & labour minister Thulas Nxesi; higher education, science & technology minister Blade Nzimande; and co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, who argued that a strike would be detrimental during a national state of disaster.
It is also understood that, crucially, ministers and even provincial premiers came to the party and agreed that their own budgets would take cuts in certain areas to accommodate the deal.
Interestingly, the man who on the surface could be hailed as a miracle worker in clinching the deal, public service & administration minister Senzo Mchunu, came in for severe criticism by unions, which said the facilitators were more successful in achieving results than he was as he “did not listen”.
Still, Mchunu will be credited for securing what appeared to be impossible a month ago: a resolution to the wage negotiations without further disruption to SA and the economy.
On labour’s side, unions canvassed by the FM said their members simply did not have the appetite for a strike. But the country’s largest public-sector union, the National Education, Health & Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu), did not sign the deal as it manages internal union politics in the lead-up to its national elective conference later this year.
The FM understands that during the facilitation process between public-sector unions and the government, Nehawu was largely on board — even after the mandating process, it was on the same page as other unions.
Which is why most unions in the chamber, including its sister union in labour federation Cosatu, the SA Democratic Teachers Union, were surprised that it rejected the deal at the last minute. Nonetheless, Nehawu is still bound by the deal and its members will still benefit from it — a fact that the union's bosses are keenly aware of.
In the end it is a better outcome than the government expected or could even have hoped for, given the hardline stance displayed by unions already angered by the government reneging on the third leg of its 2018 wage agreement — a move that was unsuccessfully challenged in court by labour.
It could be that labour has learnt its lesson from its fight with the government over the 2018 wage deal; the government had placed numerous sweeteners on the table as a compromise but labour took a hardline, opting for court instead — and, to its surprise, lost.
Unions are now in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the last leg of the deal in the Constitutional Court on August 24. The outcome of that case will be crucial for labour relations, because at the heart of it is whether increases are legitimate when they are unaffordable and not sanctioned by the Treasury.
The government has given itself some breathing room, but the next round of talks are set to kick off as soon as September. While it has resolved wage talks in state-owned company Transnet, an epic fight between labour and Eskom is on the horizon. Watch this space.
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