{"id":254812,"date":"2023-03-24T21:43:30","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T19:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/saccawu-members-march-to-parliament\/"},"modified":"2023-03-24T21:43:30","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T19:43:30","slug":"saccawu-members-march-to-parliament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/saccawu-members-march-to-parliament\/","title":{"rendered":"SACCAWU members march to Parliament"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Vincent%20Lali\/saccawu-vincentlali-202303240.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"warn_big\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/saccawu-members-march-to-parliament.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">SA Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers\u2019 Union members launched a strike at Makro with a march in Cape Town on Friday. Photo: Vincent Lali<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Striking SACCAWU members marched to Parliament on Friday to call on the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition to intervene in the union\u2019s dispute with Makro.<\/li>\n<li>SACCAWU wants a salary increase of R900 a month or 12%, whichever is greater, and a 20% commission on sales, among other things.<\/li>\n<li>Makro says it will not amend its offer of 4.5% which has already been accepted by SACCAWU in other stores such as Game and Builders.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>About 100 striking members of the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) marched to Parliament to hand over a memorandum to the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition calling on it to intervene in a dispute with Makro.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/saccawu-members-march-to-parliament.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>Regional secretary Crosby Booi said about 600 SACCAWU members worked for Makro in the Western Cape.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy marching to Parliament, we are not fighting our government,\u201d he said. \u201cWe just want the minister to intervene and put pressure on Makro to negotiate with us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Booi said since Makro\u2019s holding company Massmart had been taken over by US giant Walmart, there had been retrenchments and store closures. Booi said Makro had \u201cimposed\u201d a salary increase of 4.5% in December last year and had refused to negotiate with the union.<\/p>\n<p>In its memorandum, the union demanded an across the board increase of R900 a month or 12%, whichever is greater; a minimum wage of R8,000 a month; the reinstatement of dismissed workers; 20% commission on sales; and a moratorium on retrenchments, among other things.<\/p>\n<p>Andile Ngqaneka, Regional Chairperson of SACCAWU, said Walmart was known as a \u201cunion basher.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Malvern de Bruyn, Provincial Secretary of COSATU, to which SACCAWU is affiliated, said he supported the \u201cjust cause\u201d of the workers. \u201cWe can\u2019t keep quiet while a company from outside suppresses the workers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Makro spokesperson Brian Leroni said about 30% of unionised staff had taken part in the picket, and most stores had not been affected. \u201cOur research has revealed little support for the strike action among SACCAWU members,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEvidence supporting this is that here has been a massive spike in resignations from the union since the strike action was announced.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In addition, said Leroni, more than 1,200 Makro employees had resigned from the union to accept the company\u2019s wage offer.<\/p>\n<p>The union demand for a 12% increase and a 20% commission on sales was \u201cquite clearly unrealistic\u201d, he said, and SACCAWU had already accepted the company\u2019s offer at Game stores and Builders stores. \u201cWe have no intention of amending our wage offer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Nwabisa Spambo, who works as a receiver at Makro in Ottery and was one of the marchers, said she battled to feed her family.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy groceries run out before the end of the month. Mid-month I must borrow money from friends for food. We need the salary increase because food and bus fares go up every day,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Moosa Ebrahim, Chief of Staff of the Department, received the memorandum and promised to take it to Minister Ebrahim Patel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/saccawu-members-march-to-parliament.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SA Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers\u2019 Union members launched a strike at Makro with a march in Cape Town on Friday. Photo: Vincent Lali Striking SACCAWU members marched to Parliament on Friday to call on the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition to intervene in the union\u2019s dispute with Makro. SACCAWU wants a salary increase [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":254813,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-254812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/saccawu-members-march-to-parliament.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}