THE South African Post Office’s (Sapo’s) new CEO, Mark Barnes, has been making headlines as he attempts the difficult task of resuscitating the organisation. Across the world, post offices face the challenge of responding to new communication technologies that are bringing about the demise of the letter.
Barnes inherited an industrial relations nightmare: four unions at war with each other and with management, violent strike tactics, and a distrustful and resentful workforce.
The rapid change in communications technology is outside the control of Sapo or any other organisation. That Sapo’s industrial relations degenerated into industrial war is entirely the organisation’s fault. It is rooted in the disastrous decision to use labour brokers 15 years ago.
Given the centrality of any organisation’s employees to its success, the recent collective agreement between Sapo and its three largest unions heralds a critical step in turning the post office around.
What is needed is an organisation able to provide important services for all South Africans that Sapo is in a unique position to deliver sustainably. The settlement with labour has only been made possible by Barnes’s fundraising achievement. Equally, the settlement with labour is central to ensuring that the capital injection being made results in the establishment of a viable business model.
Central to the collective bargaining agreement are measures that will finally end the inequalities introduced by labour broking. At its height in about 2010, almost a third of the Sapo workforce were casuals employed by labour brokers earning about a quarter of what their permanent co-workers earned. It was an unsustainable parallel industrial relations system that allowed the organisation to report profits for a number of years before being convulsed by rapidly escalating strikes and disruptions.
The current settlement has brought an end to a counterproductive, piecemeal strategy that set unions and worker committees against each other, and unequivocally draws a line under the catastrophe of labour broking in Sapo.
It provides for the conversion of all workers into permanent positions (full-and part-time) on the basis of equal pay for equal work.
Kudos go to Barnes and his management team for finally laying to rest the inequalities of labour broking. Kudos should also go to the Democratic Postal and Communications Union, which has transformed from a workers’ committee that, by necessity, operated in the streets, to a union fighting for the interests of its members at the negotiating table.
The union’s leadership gave the new CEO the time he needed to raise funds when many of its own members were baying for strikes.
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Regrettably, one union that also emerged from the casuals’ workers committees remains in the cold and on the streets. Given that the recent agreement covers all Sapo employees, it is unclear what it is fighting for and why it is using tactics that should now belong to a past chapter of Sapo’s industrial relations history.
There is a real prospect now, if all stakeholders pull together, for Sapo to serve the public and provide decent jobs for its employees. It is a window of opportunity that is unlikely to be repeated.
There is a lesson from this long story of industrial conflict in Sapo. Labour broking has finally been subject to regulation with the Labour Relations Act amendments that came into effect last year. Yet a parallel labour force comprising precarious workers remains a hallmark of the economy. It provides cheap labour. It also sows the seeds of strife. The challenge that faces managers in the public and private sector is whether they go for short-term savings, but create long-term chaos, or build organisational success on sustainable employment strategies.
• Dickinson is professor of sociology at Wits University and the author of the Society, Work and Development Institute report Fighting Their Own Battles: The Mabarete and the End of Labour Broking in Sapo
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