New offer made to Telkom workers
The three unions have said they intend to launch what has been called the biggest strike action by Telkom workers on Monday to demonstrate their unhappiness with the wages and bonuses paid to workers.
According to Telkom they were “unable to proceed with negotiations but handed over copies of its revised offer to all three unions.”
Telkom’s recount of the benefits this new offer holds to their workers is vague but promises “substantial gains to employees with regard to long-service awards, compression of grades and gain-sharing.”
"The latter issue, highlighted as a major source of employee dissatisfaction, would have seen gain-sharing for lowest paid employees increase by over 400%," Telkom said.
The incumbent has stated that this offer is on condition that workers cease their threat to strike.
“The revised offer has been made on condition that employees do not engage in industrial action next week,” stated Charlotte Mokoena, Telkom’s Group Executive for Human Resources.
The timing of this offer is interesting when considering that by the time the unions had received the proposal most workers were getting ready to leave work making it difficult for unions to avert strike action on Monday.
Spokesperson for Solidarity, Dirk Hermann, said that in all probability the strike action would go through but the union will closely examine the offer put on the table by the incumbent.
“We will definitely consider the offer posed by Telkom and take it back to our members on Monday but it is unlikely that the strike will be averted,” stated Hermann.
It appears that Telkom is now not only struggling to keep customers happy but also staff members. It is however not surprising to see unhappy staff when Telkom’s top structure earns bonuses totaling millions while other staff must be happy with as little as a few thousand.
Ironically, employee satisfaction was one of five of Telkom CEO, Papi Molotsane’s pillars designed to uphold his new strategy to transform Telkom’s business model. The second was a consumer-centric approach designed to make Telkom a ‘delight’ to deal with.
With two of the five pillars crumbling one begins to wonder just how well his strategy is holding out.
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