Workers Picket the Office of South Africa’s Largest Defense Manufacturer

October 28, 2024 –
From The Left Chapter

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Image via NUMSA on Facebook

By Global News Service

Workers at Denel, South Africa’s largest manufacturer of defense equipment, picketed the corporation’s office in the town of Centurion on October 24, demanding a wage hike of 15 percent.

Except for an “insignificant” 4 percent increase last November, workers have had no wage hikes for the last five years, even as the cost of the household food basket went up by almost 68 percent in this period, from R3,184.63 in October 2019 to R5,348.65 in October 2024.

Consequently, “real wages have seen a dramatic decline,” said Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, spokesperson of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), which led this action.

NUMSA members are also demanding the reinstatement of the inconvenience allowance of R5000 for workers relocated to different cities and the immediate restart of contributions to the pension fund by Denel Vehicle Systems (DVS).

“These are all benefits that workers lost during the radical restructuring that the Department of Public Enterprise imposed during the COVID-19 lockdown,” reducing the workforce to 1,600 from 3,000 in 2019, Hlubi-Majola told Peoples Dispatch.

Drained by corrupt contracts and mismanagement, Denel plunged into a liquidity crisis in 2019, reportedly arriving at the “brink of collapse” by 2021.

Drawing parallels to the crisis in South African Airways (SAA) and the electricity producer Eskom, NUMSA’s Deputy General Secretary Mbuso Ngubane told workers on the picket line that the government is “deliberately destroying” State-Owned Entities (SOEs) to convince the public that their privatization is the only way forward.

from the Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service