Strike at SAB comes to an end

Fortunately, reason prevailed. After a five week-long battle over wages turned violent with more than 72 incidents of violence and intimidation, both sides in the dispute resolved on 5 November 2013 to call off the first strike to hit the brewer in 16 years.

Although the strike appears to have had a minimal impact, SAB, the South African unit of brewer SABMiller, would have been keen to bring it to an end before the year-end season. A boycott of SAB’s products, if called for by the union, would have been most inopportune for SAB, which has a market share of nearly 90 percent.

SABMiller said it had agreed to raise wages by 7 percent, plus performance-related pay, back-dated to 1 July 2013.

Workers led by the Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu) were initially demanding a 9.5% wage hike and for the company to do away with performance-related pay. SAB’s previous offer had been a 7 percent average wage increase with performance-related pay. Fawu countered that the “conditional” offer of 7 percent represented “an actual increase of 4.2 percent across the board and 2.8 percent to discretionary performance-regulated pay”.

The final pay settlement, which raises the average monthly pay to just over ZAR18,000 (USD 1,750), is above an inflation rate of about 6 percent and reflects similar accords across the local economy, South African media reported.

SABMiller employs about 5,600 workers in its South African beer division, of whom about 1,900 are union members, the brewer said. Only 750 people took part in the strike.