SA Labour: More workers ditch unions in pay talks

More Employees are directly negotiating their salary increases, side-stepping union representation, Statistics South African’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows.

The survey for the third quarter shows a 196,000 drop in union membership in the third quarter compared to last year.

Membership dropped 84,000 in the first quarter and by 17,000 in the second quarter of this year.

A volatile labour force is often cited as a factor that hampers economic growth, but only 29% of SA’s workforce is unionised.

The drastic drop in the third quarter took place in an environment of retrenchments, forced on the market by tough economic conditions. A near implosion of the country's largest labour federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), also contributed significantly, analysts told Business Day on Thursday. Cosatu is currently battling issues of factionalism that have filtered into it from its alliance partner, the African National Congress.

Stakeholder Solutions labour analyst Gavin Hartford on Thursday said the decline could be related to wide-scale retrenchments in labour-intensive sectors such as manufacturing and mining.

Increased union rivalry in workplaces often led to a large number of workers becoming nonunionised.

"We are also seeing a greater propensity among organised unions … to devote energy against one another instead of organising on those that are nonunionised," he said.

In the long term, Mr Hartford said SA was entering an era of "multi-unionism" in workplaces previously dominated by a single majority union, potentially leading to a challenging and unstable environment.

Mining and labour analyst Mamokgethi Molopyane said the fracturing of the country’s largest trade union federation, was a factor in the decline and a younger work force also meant that unions had to recruit more aggressively and use different strategies to the past.

Currently they were not doing this because of their "inward focus". Cosatu president Sdumo Dlamini said union density had been in decline over time, but the federation was getting back on track and was not losing members. Federation of Trade Unions of SA general secretary Dennis George also attributed the decline to retrenchments in the industrial sectors of the economy.

Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) president Joseph Mathunjwa said the consistent growth of Amcu offset the retrenchments in the sector.