It’s back to reality for metalworkers’ union as it swaps risky money spinning with lucrative R200 billion industry-wide pension investment funds for its members in the major steel, engineering, auto and motor retail industries.

The National Union of Metalworkers of SA(Numsa), in a last-minute bid to save 50 percent of metalworkers’ monthly pension contributions which were creamed-off by pension fund administration fees, has traded in outdated and exploitative pension schemes for big rewarding industry-wide retirement funds.

Industry funds will have a head start in advancing best financial rewards as these would leverage economies of scale. The investment funds are expected to offer employees more than a million rand payments each in 18 years.

Employees in the metal and engineering industries have been contributing on average about R400 a month to the pension funds. And the R200 of the employees’ monthly contributions have been ripped off by the fund administrators.

Now that Numsa has consolidated industry retirement funds in the past years, we have learnt the hard way that we can no longer live with fund administrators’ exorbitant fees, Numsa national benefits coordinator Sam Tsiane said.

It came as a hammer blow when the Financial Services Board advised us that our members were not going to get any adequate returns on current pension contributions because they were far less than the required targets unless we axed the job of fund administration to be performed by industry bargaining councils.

The miserable pension fund performances for metalworkers have been compounded by the exclusion of black workers from pension investment schemes which were declared out-of-bounds by the then apartheid Pensions Act until in the late 1980’s.

Numsa is now preparing to take up a brave struggle with the employers to increase monthly retirement pension contributions from 15% to more than 20%.

For further information contact:

Mziwakhe Hlangani, Numsa national spokesperson

Cell phone: 082 9407116

E-mail : mziwakheh@numsa.org.za

Source

Numsa Press Releases