Essential The Africa the Media Doesn't Tell You About
- Thread starter TommyHilltrigga
- Start date
I was very surprised at how close Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are. For that matter Ivory Coast is very close by.
reasonable_doubter
Banned
Secure Da Bag
Veteran
Holy shyt. God bless those wonderfully smart people.
Maybe we should all be reading this book.
Sudanese hope Ethiopian dam ends Blue Nile floods
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 17 2019
Water flows through Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam as it undergoes construction work on the river Nile in Guba Woreda, Benishangul Gumuz Region, Ethiopia on September 26, 2019. PHOTO | REUTERS
The Blue Nile is a renegade river, according to Sudanese farmer Osman Idris, its unpredictable flooding swallows crops and houses as it crashes through Sudan from Ethiopia on its way to Egypt.
"Tonight, the level of water will be low," said Idris, a resident of Juref Gharb, a small village on the bank of the Blue Nile outside Khartoum.
"Tomorrow, it will swallow all the houses...It's a renegade river, it rises so fast," said the 60-year-old, dressed in a traditional Sudanese robe.
For Idris, Ethiopia's construction of a controversial dam on the Blue Nile is a dream come true, as it promises to regulate the floods that inundate Sudan every rainy season.
This year alone, flash flooding has killed more than 60 and injured dozens in Sudan.
The Blue Nile joins the White Nile in Khartoum and supplies the overwhelming majority of the Nile's water, which runs through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.
Construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam began in 2012, but since then Egypt has sounded the alarm that the project would severely reduce its water supplies.
Egypt depends on the Nile for about 90 percent of its irrigation and drinking water, and says it has "historic rights" to the river guaranteed by treaties from 1929 and 1959.
It sees the project as an existential threat, fearing Ethiopia's rapid construction of the dam might lead to water and food scarcity for millions of Egyptians.
After several rounds of talks failed to resolve the issue, a new dialogue between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan was mediated by the United States in Washington earlier this month.
The three delegations agreed to resolve the dispute by January 15, with ministerial-level talks being held this week in Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia insists the $4 billion hydro-electric barrage is essential for its economic growth given that most of its population still lives without electricity.
And in Sudan, farmers hope the dam will provide predictable flow.
Over the years, farmers like Idris who own farms along the Nile have been forced to change their crops due to flood devastation and tonnes of deposited silt.
Brickmakers fire blocks of mud in riverside kilns, producing smoke harmful to crops.
"I had to shift from cultivating fruits and vegetables to animal feed," Idris told AFP.
Being reliant on flooding for irrigation means only one harvest per year and limits the kind of crops that can be grown.
If the river's flow were regulated, more intensive agriculture could be practised, Idris said.
"We can plant crops through the year. It will be better for the environment and for marketing our products, which means more income for us," Idris said.
Ekram Dagash, a professor at Khartoum's Al-Zaiem Al-Azhari University, agreed that Sudan stands to gain from the dam, which will maintain water levels and block unwanted silt.
"Ethiopia is building the dam for one reason only, to produce electricity and export it, not only to neighbouring countries but to the whole African continent," she told AFP.
But one group of Sudanese are concerned about the dam: brickmakers, who depend on the silt for their livelihood.
Dozens of small kilns line the river, providing an income for hundreds of brickmakers like Yakoub Noreen.
"If the dam is built, this won't arrive," the 40-year-old said of the silt he was standing in, as he pressed wet clay into a mould.
Nearby, workers stacked bricks into a kiln belching thick smoke. Later they will be sold for 1,500 Sudanese pounds ($32) per 1,000 bricks, Noreen said.
Professor Dagash said workers can be compensated and provided alternative livelihoods if brickworks close, adding that benefits from the dam outweighed such losses.
Vast areas of land would open up for agriculture as well as industrial projects, she said.
"The dam will provide Sudan with low cost electricity...and low cost electricity means more growth," she said.
Sudanese hope Ethiopian dam ends Blue Nile floods
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 17 2019
Water flows through Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam as it undergoes construction work on the river Nile in Guba Woreda, Benishangul Gumuz Region, Ethiopia on September 26, 2019. PHOTO | REUTERS
The Blue Nile is a renegade river, according to Sudanese farmer Osman Idris, its unpredictable flooding swallows crops and houses as it crashes through Sudan from Ethiopia on its way to Egypt.
"Tonight, the level of water will be low," said Idris, a resident of Juref Gharb, a small village on the bank of the Blue Nile outside Khartoum.
"Tomorrow, it will swallow all the houses...It's a renegade river, it rises so fast," said the 60-year-old, dressed in a traditional Sudanese robe.
For Idris, Ethiopia's construction of a controversial dam on the Blue Nile is a dream come true, as it promises to regulate the floods that inundate Sudan every rainy season.
This year alone, flash flooding has killed more than 60 and injured dozens in Sudan.
The Blue Nile joins the White Nile in Khartoum and supplies the overwhelming majority of the Nile's water, which runs through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.
Construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam began in 2012, but since then Egypt has sounded the alarm that the project would severely reduce its water supplies.
Egypt depends on the Nile for about 90 percent of its irrigation and drinking water, and says it has "historic rights" to the river guaranteed by treaties from 1929 and 1959.
It sees the project as an existential threat, fearing Ethiopia's rapid construction of the dam might lead to water and food scarcity for millions of Egyptians.
After several rounds of talks failed to resolve the issue, a new dialogue between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan was mediated by the United States in Washington earlier this month.
The three delegations agreed to resolve the dispute by January 15, with ministerial-level talks being held this week in Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia insists the $4 billion hydro-electric barrage is essential for its economic growth given that most of its population still lives without electricity.
And in Sudan, farmers hope the dam will provide predictable flow.
Over the years, farmers like Idris who own farms along the Nile have been forced to change their crops due to flood devastation and tonnes of deposited silt.
Brickmakers fire blocks of mud in riverside kilns, producing smoke harmful to crops.
"I had to shift from cultivating fruits and vegetables to animal feed," Idris told AFP.
Being reliant on flooding for irrigation means only one harvest per year and limits the kind of crops that can be grown.
If the river's flow were regulated, more intensive agriculture could be practised, Idris said.
"We can plant crops through the year. It will be better for the environment and for marketing our products, which means more income for us," Idris said.
Ekram Dagash, a professor at Khartoum's Al-Zaiem Al-Azhari University, agreed that Sudan stands to gain from the dam, which will maintain water levels and block unwanted silt.
"Ethiopia is building the dam for one reason only, to produce electricity and export it, not only to neighbouring countries but to the whole African continent," she told AFP.
But one group of Sudanese are concerned about the dam: brickmakers, who depend on the silt for their livelihood.
Dozens of small kilns line the river, providing an income for hundreds of brickmakers like Yakoub Noreen.
"If the dam is built, this won't arrive," the 40-year-old said of the silt he was standing in, as he pressed wet clay into a mould.
Nearby, workers stacked bricks into a kiln belching thick smoke. Later they will be sold for 1,500 Sudanese pounds ($32) per 1,000 bricks, Noreen said.
Professor Dagash said workers can be compensated and provided alternative livelihoods if brickworks close, adding that benefits from the dam outweighed such losses.
Vast areas of land would open up for agriculture as well as industrial projects, she said.
"The dam will provide Sudan with low cost electricity...and low cost electricity means more growth," she said.
Sudanese hope Ethiopian dam ends Blue Nile floods
loyola llothta
☭☭☭
18 November 2019
Washington Threatens Egypt with Sanctions Over Russian Su-35 Fighter Jet Purchase
By Sarah Abed
Washington’s latest attempt to dissuade an ally from making arms deals with Russia came in the form of a letter sent on last Wednesday to Egyptian officials warning them that they could face sanctions if they continued with their $2 billion dollar Su-35 fighter jets contract.
Link:
Washington threatens Egypt with Sanctions over Russian Su-35 fighter jet purchase
reasonable_doubter
Banned
reasonable_doubter
Banned
Space In Africa (@spaceinafrica1) | Twitter
^^^After IT, space exploration is the next big new industry.....
^^^After IT, space exploration is the next big new industry.....
Red Shield
Global Domination
18 November 2019
Washington Threatens Egypt with Sanctions Over Russian Su-35 Fighter Jet Purchase
By Sarah Abed
Washington’s latest attempt to dissuade an ally from making arms deals with Russia came in the form of a letter sent on last Wednesday to Egyptian officials warning them that they could face sanctions if they continued with their $2 billion dollar Su-35 fighter jets contract.
Link:
Washington threatens Egypt with Sanctions over Russian Su-35 fighter jet purchase
All of the usa's allies outside of the western hemisphere know exactly what time it is for america.
I expect to see more of this
Secure Da Bag
Veteran
Dr. Arikana defends against smearing by AU
Secure Da Bag
Veteran
at all the foreign bases
Red Shield
Global Domination
You strike the unions, you strike the bedrock of workers
Vashna Jagarnath • 19 November 2019
If the unions in South Africa were to be crushed, and a full-blown neo-liberal programme implemented, the social costs would be devastating. This could, in turn, pose real risks for democracy.
The increasingly rabid anti-union frenzy gathering pace in our public sphere is seriously disturbing, dangerous, and often astonishingly ill-informed. Reading some commentators, one gets the impression that it is trade unions, and their support for a living wage and opposition to retrenchments, rather than the ruling party and capital that are responsible for our economic crisis, and the worrying condition of the state-owned enterprises.
Our economic crisis has various dimensions, but a central problem has been the ANC’s long-standing and dogmatic commitment, in the face of all available evidence, to conservative macroeconomic policies. The looting during the years of Jacob Zuma’s period in office and the capture of key institutions by a predatory network seriously compounded the economic crisis, as did the investment strike by capital.
Zuma sometimes masked his predatory politics in the language of radical nationalism. This has emboldened the right who now feel morally vindicated. In the Democratic Alliance, white revanchism is now openly pursued. In the broader public sphere, there is now a shrill chorus calling for the state to impose an austerity programme on public spending, privatise state-owned enterprises and break the remaining power of the unions.
This standard slew of neoliberal policies, in essence, a structural adjustment programme, is being pushed hardest by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, but is clearly also supported by President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose lack of economic and political imagination is dire. Across the globe, structural adjustment (the name for neo-liberalism in the global South) and austerity (the name for neo-liberalism in the global North) programmes have had the same disastrous results. The rich have got richer, the working class have been plunged into crisis and the lives of the middle classes have become increasingly precarious.
Today, in South Africa, union demands for a living wage and opposition to retrenchments are being presented, sometimes in apocalyptic terms, as the cause of our problems and a grave threat to our future.
The public is made to forget that it is because of trade unions that we have the eight-hour workday and the weekend. It is because of trade unions that we have paid annual leave, terms and references of contract, paid parental leave, equal pay for women in the workplace and mechanisms for dealing with various other forms of discrimination that arise in the workplace.
It is the trade union that provides the worker with solidarity against the big multinational companies and takes on key issues affecting both individual workers and workers collectively. These gains don’t just benefit the unionised worker. They also benefit society at large. This is particularly so in South Africa, where large numbers of people are often dependent on a single paycheque.
A recent study that looked at 150 countries from 1900 to today, and which is described in some detail in The Washington Post, shows that industrial workers have been key agents of democratisation, and are often more important for sustaining and deepening democracy than the middle classes.
A number of right-wing commentators are presenting the strike currently underway at SAA as a decisive turning point for the country. For these commentators, it is imperative that the unions must be broken at SAA as a dress rehearsal for the big battle looming at Eskom. They take the view that if the unions can be broken at SAA, and then Eskom, the government will then be free to pursue a full neo-liberal programme of privatisation, retrenchments and austerity.
John Kane-Berman of the increasingly right-wing Institute of Race Relations has drawn an analogy with the miners’ strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. He details the strategies that Margaret Thatcher used to break that strike and calls for similar action to be taken against unions in the current South African conjuncture.
Others have drawn comparisons with the way that Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike in the United States in 1981. In both cases, the breaking of a strike set up conditions for a long period of neoliberal hegemony. The result was devastation for the working classes, increasing precariousness for the middle classes and then, in the end, the disastrous vote in support of Brexit in 2016, and the equally disastrous vote for Donald Trump in the same year.
A recent study shows that in England, the wealth of the top 600 aristocratic families has doubled in the last decade. This is because the elites in general, and aristocrats in particular, prospered massively under Thatcher’s financial deregulation and economic liberalisation.
Reagan’s firing of over 12,000 workers in one go, on 3 August 1981, not only dramatically affected the lives of the affected workers, but was a calamity for the working class in general in the US and marked the beginning of the weakening of worker power and the working class in general. In 2011, on average less than 2% of workers staged walk-outs in the US and were willing to go on strike, severely decreasing the power of the working class.
It is important to note that the neo-liberal hegemony ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan wasn’t just an economic and social disaster for the working class in the UK and the US. It also caused such deep social crisis that democracy itself came to be threatened.
If the unions in South Africa were to be crushed, and a full-blown neo-liberal programme implemented, the social costs would be devastating. This could, in turn, pose real risks for democracy. Already a number of right-wing commentators are looking to Paul Kagame’s model of authoritarian capitalism in Rwanda as a way forward for South Africa.
SAA is promising to retrench 944 workers. In the current economic crisis, with mass unemployment, every worker facing retrenchment lives with the very real fear that they will not find another job. These 944 workers did not cause SAA’s problems but are now being presented as if they were, in fact, the cause of the crisis at the airline. The problems faced by the airline are a direct result of serious mismanagement by its top executives and the state over many years, a problem that became particularly acute during the Zuma years.
Adam Voss, the current CEO of SAA, draws an annual salary of R6-million. General managers earn R4-million. This is on the back of mass corruption and inflated and inexplicable outsourcing deals taken on by SAA as outlined in a recent report by Ernest & Young, which recommended that these external contracts needed to be urgently dealt with in order to reduce the high costs incurred by SAA. It is revealing that neither these kinds of hugely inflated salaries, nor dodgy external contracts, result in vilification in the media.
Numsa has recently noted that at “SAA Technical there was a contract with KWE which had inflated costs. The service was for warehousing which cost SAAT R22-million per annum. It was immediately cancelled and now SAAT is saving approximately R11-million per annum as a result of that decision. This was because of pressure from the unions.”
Furthermore, there have been repeated calls from the unions for the dismissal of board chairperson Thandeka Mgoduso, and the corrupt board, which has brought SAA to the brink of collapse twice in four years. These calls have fallen on deaf ears. Mgoduso was also caught up in a tender scandal with 21stCentury Consulting. While this accusation was denied by 21st Century, the evidence for these claims arises from an internal report commissioned by the board of SAA’s chief risk and compliance officer, advocate Vusi Pikoli.
In a press statement released on 17 November 2019 Numsa argues that, “Mgoduso and her cronies have bloated the wage bill by creating managerial positions at SAAT which did not originally exist in the company structure. That is why we have filed an application at the South Gauteng High Court for her and the entire SAA Technical board to be declared delinquent.”
The unions represent workers who have a deep personal investment in the viability of the organisations for which they work. But instead of seeing workers as the people with the most to lose should an organisation collapse, they are constantly being misrepresented as a threat to the very organisations that sustain them and their families.
The people who looted SAA and Eskom must be held accountable. The people who enabled this looting, including many senior members of the ruling party, must also be held accountable. The blame for the disastrous management of our state-owned enterprises in recent years must not be laid at the feet of the workers, the people who have the most to lose should these organisations collapse.
Our state-owned enterprises need to be fixed, not sold off for a song. For anyone concerned with questions of justice, or even just a viable future for South Africa, now is the time for us to get behind the workers of SAA and Eskom. We need to oppose retrenchments, support struggles for a living wage, ensure justice for the looters, and build state-owned enterprises that can fulfil their social functions effectively. DM
OPINIONISTA: You strike the unions, you strike the bedrock of workers
Vashna Jagarnath • 19 November 2019
If the unions in South Africa were to be crushed, and a full-blown neo-liberal programme implemented, the social costs would be devastating. This could, in turn, pose real risks for democracy.
The increasingly rabid anti-union frenzy gathering pace in our public sphere is seriously disturbing, dangerous, and often astonishingly ill-informed. Reading some commentators, one gets the impression that it is trade unions, and their support for a living wage and opposition to retrenchments, rather than the ruling party and capital that are responsible for our economic crisis, and the worrying condition of the state-owned enterprises.
Our economic crisis has various dimensions, but a central problem has been the ANC’s long-standing and dogmatic commitment, in the face of all available evidence, to conservative macroeconomic policies. The looting during the years of Jacob Zuma’s period in office and the capture of key institutions by a predatory network seriously compounded the economic crisis, as did the investment strike by capital.
Zuma sometimes masked his predatory politics in the language of radical nationalism. This has emboldened the right who now feel morally vindicated. In the Democratic Alliance, white revanchism is now openly pursued. In the broader public sphere, there is now a shrill chorus calling for the state to impose an austerity programme on public spending, privatise state-owned enterprises and break the remaining power of the unions.
This standard slew of neoliberal policies, in essence, a structural adjustment programme, is being pushed hardest by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, but is clearly also supported by President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose lack of economic and political imagination is dire. Across the globe, structural adjustment (the name for neo-liberalism in the global South) and austerity (the name for neo-liberalism in the global North) programmes have had the same disastrous results. The rich have got richer, the working class have been plunged into crisis and the lives of the middle classes have become increasingly precarious.
Today, in South Africa, union demands for a living wage and opposition to retrenchments are being presented, sometimes in apocalyptic terms, as the cause of our problems and a grave threat to our future.
The public is made to forget that it is because of trade unions that we have the eight-hour workday and the weekend. It is because of trade unions that we have paid annual leave, terms and references of contract, paid parental leave, equal pay for women in the workplace and mechanisms for dealing with various other forms of discrimination that arise in the workplace.
It is the trade union that provides the worker with solidarity against the big multinational companies and takes on key issues affecting both individual workers and workers collectively. These gains don’t just benefit the unionised worker. They also benefit society at large. This is particularly so in South Africa, where large numbers of people are often dependent on a single paycheque.
A recent study that looked at 150 countries from 1900 to today, and which is described in some detail in The Washington Post, shows that industrial workers have been key agents of democratisation, and are often more important for sustaining and deepening democracy than the middle classes.
A number of right-wing commentators are presenting the strike currently underway at SAA as a decisive turning point for the country. For these commentators, it is imperative that the unions must be broken at SAA as a dress rehearsal for the big battle looming at Eskom. They take the view that if the unions can be broken at SAA, and then Eskom, the government will then be free to pursue a full neo-liberal programme of privatisation, retrenchments and austerity.
John Kane-Berman of the increasingly right-wing Institute of Race Relations has drawn an analogy with the miners’ strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. He details the strategies that Margaret Thatcher used to break that strike and calls for similar action to be taken against unions in the current South African conjuncture.
Others have drawn comparisons with the way that Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike in the United States in 1981. In both cases, the breaking of a strike set up conditions for a long period of neoliberal hegemony. The result was devastation for the working classes, increasing precariousness for the middle classes and then, in the end, the disastrous vote in support of Brexit in 2016, and the equally disastrous vote for Donald Trump in the same year.
A recent study shows that in England, the wealth of the top 600 aristocratic families has doubled in the last decade. This is because the elites in general, and aristocrats in particular, prospered massively under Thatcher’s financial deregulation and economic liberalisation.
Reagan’s firing of over 12,000 workers in one go, on 3 August 1981, not only dramatically affected the lives of the affected workers, but was a calamity for the working class in general in the US and marked the beginning of the weakening of worker power and the working class in general. In 2011, on average less than 2% of workers staged walk-outs in the US and were willing to go on strike, severely decreasing the power of the working class.
It is important to note that the neo-liberal hegemony ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan wasn’t just an economic and social disaster for the working class in the UK and the US. It also caused such deep social crisis that democracy itself came to be threatened.
If the unions in South Africa were to be crushed, and a full-blown neo-liberal programme implemented, the social costs would be devastating. This could, in turn, pose real risks for democracy. Already a number of right-wing commentators are looking to Paul Kagame’s model of authoritarian capitalism in Rwanda as a way forward for South Africa.
SAA is promising to retrench 944 workers. In the current economic crisis, with mass unemployment, every worker facing retrenchment lives with the very real fear that they will not find another job. These 944 workers did not cause SAA’s problems but are now being presented as if they were, in fact, the cause of the crisis at the airline. The problems faced by the airline are a direct result of serious mismanagement by its top executives and the state over many years, a problem that became particularly acute during the Zuma years.
Adam Voss, the current CEO of SAA, draws an annual salary of R6-million. General managers earn R4-million. This is on the back of mass corruption and inflated and inexplicable outsourcing deals taken on by SAA as outlined in a recent report by Ernest & Young, which recommended that these external contracts needed to be urgently dealt with in order to reduce the high costs incurred by SAA. It is revealing that neither these kinds of hugely inflated salaries, nor dodgy external contracts, result in vilification in the media.
Numsa has recently noted that at “SAA Technical there was a contract with KWE which had inflated costs. The service was for warehousing which cost SAAT R22-million per annum. It was immediately cancelled and now SAAT is saving approximately R11-million per annum as a result of that decision. This was because of pressure from the unions.”
Furthermore, there have been repeated calls from the unions for the dismissal of board chairperson Thandeka Mgoduso, and the corrupt board, which has brought SAA to the brink of collapse twice in four years. These calls have fallen on deaf ears. Mgoduso was also caught up in a tender scandal with 21stCentury Consulting. While this accusation was denied by 21st Century, the evidence for these claims arises from an internal report commissioned by the board of SAA’s chief risk and compliance officer, advocate Vusi Pikoli.
In a press statement released on 17 November 2019 Numsa argues that, “Mgoduso and her cronies have bloated the wage bill by creating managerial positions at SAAT which did not originally exist in the company structure. That is why we have filed an application at the South Gauteng High Court for her and the entire SAA Technical board to be declared delinquent.”
The unions represent workers who have a deep personal investment in the viability of the organisations for which they work. But instead of seeing workers as the people with the most to lose should an organisation collapse, they are constantly being misrepresented as a threat to the very organisations that sustain them and their families.
The people who looted SAA and Eskom must be held accountable. The people who enabled this looting, including many senior members of the ruling party, must also be held accountable. The blame for the disastrous management of our state-owned enterprises in recent years must not be laid at the feet of the workers, the people who have the most to lose should these organisations collapse.
Our state-owned enterprises need to be fixed, not sold off for a song. For anyone concerned with questions of justice, or even just a viable future for South Africa, now is the time for us to get behind the workers of SAA and Eskom. We need to oppose retrenchments, support struggles for a living wage, ensure justice for the looters, and build state-owned enterprises that can fulfil their social functions effectively. DM
OPINIONISTA: You strike the unions, you strike the bedrock of workers
Triumphant Numsa, Sacca: How we got to 8% from SAA
Nov 22 2019 21:01 | Carin Smith
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the South African Cabin Crew Association say they are pleased that they secured the 8% wage increase they demanded from South African Airways.
SAA initially would not budge from offering 5.9%.
The new wage increase agreed to on Friday is, however, subject to the necessary funds being obtained by the financially embattled state-owned airline.
The unions and the airline had been locked in negotiations for the past two days to find a settlement to resolve a week-long strike at SAA and SAA Technical.
The cash-strapped airline previously said the strike was costing it about R52m a day. It also led to some flights being cancelled.
SAA has now agreed to pay a 5.9% wage increase on total cost of employment. It is now up to a task team, facilitated by the dispute resolution body the CCMA, to find the cost savings needed for the airline to make up the remaining 2.1% of the effective 8% wage increase.
The task team must identify contracts which are "onerous to the finances of SAA" and ensure that such contracts are either re-negotiated, cancelled or in-sourced, whichever is the most affordable for the airline.
Over the past 13 years, the flag carrier has incurred over R28bn in cumulative losses. In the medium-term budget policy statement, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni announced that the state would pay off SAA's government-guaranteed debt of R9.2bn "over the next three years" to honour the airline's contractual obligations.
"Our strike was never just about securing a wage agreement. At the centre of our demand was to secure changes which would result in the long-term sustainability of the SAA group, and assist it to get back onto the path of profitability," Numsa and Sacca said in a joint statement released on Friday late afternoon.
The unions say they have also negotiated for SAA employees to participate in a training lay-off scheme. During the four to six-month period of training, SAA is only obligated to pay 25% of the salaries, including benefits, of participants. The remainder of these salaries are then paid by the Department of Labour during that period.
The unions regard this as an important intervention in the light of SAA's intention to restructure - a process which the airline has indicated could lead to job losses of up to 944 workers.
As part of their new agreement with SAA, the two unions have negotiated for any retrenchment process to be deferred to the end of January 2020.
In the view of the two unions, the participation of workers in the training layoff scheme, should assist in preventing job losses because it will save the airline wage costs. At the same time, it will develop employees' skills.
SAA earlier indicated that the restructuring process would still continue for SAA management.
The unions, furthermore, negotiated a tax benefit for employees earning less than R600 000 a year (about R50 000 per month) in the form of an educational bursary fund.
Triumphant Numsa, Sacca: How we got to 8% from SAA
Nov 22 2019 21:01 | Carin Smith
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the South African Cabin Crew Association say they are pleased that they secured the 8% wage increase they demanded from South African Airways.
SAA initially would not budge from offering 5.9%.
The new wage increase agreed to on Friday is, however, subject to the necessary funds being obtained by the financially embattled state-owned airline.
The unions and the airline had been locked in negotiations for the past two days to find a settlement to resolve a week-long strike at SAA and SAA Technical.
The cash-strapped airline previously said the strike was costing it about R52m a day. It also led to some flights being cancelled.
SAA has now agreed to pay a 5.9% wage increase on total cost of employment. It is now up to a task team, facilitated by the dispute resolution body the CCMA, to find the cost savings needed for the airline to make up the remaining 2.1% of the effective 8% wage increase.
The task team must identify contracts which are "onerous to the finances of SAA" and ensure that such contracts are either re-negotiated, cancelled or in-sourced, whichever is the most affordable for the airline.
Over the past 13 years, the flag carrier has incurred over R28bn in cumulative losses. In the medium-term budget policy statement, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni announced that the state would pay off SAA's government-guaranteed debt of R9.2bn "over the next three years" to honour the airline's contractual obligations.
"Our strike was never just about securing a wage agreement. At the centre of our demand was to secure changes which would result in the long-term sustainability of the SAA group, and assist it to get back onto the path of profitability," Numsa and Sacca said in a joint statement released on Friday late afternoon.
The unions say they have also negotiated for SAA employees to participate in a training lay-off scheme. During the four to six-month period of training, SAA is only obligated to pay 25% of the salaries, including benefits, of participants. The remainder of these salaries are then paid by the Department of Labour during that period.
The unions regard this as an important intervention in the light of SAA's intention to restructure - a process which the airline has indicated could lead to job losses of up to 944 workers.
As part of their new agreement with SAA, the two unions have negotiated for any retrenchment process to be deferred to the end of January 2020.
In the view of the two unions, the participation of workers in the training layoff scheme, should assist in preventing job losses because it will save the airline wage costs. At the same time, it will develop employees' skills.
SAA earlier indicated that the restructuring process would still continue for SAA management.
The unions, furthermore, negotiated a tax benefit for employees earning less than R600 000 a year (about R50 000 per month) in the form of an educational bursary fund.
Triumphant Numsa, Sacca: How we got to 8% from SAA