Industrial mandarins should set childish behaviour aside and save steel and metal industries for the growing sense of global economic slowdown has triggered irreversible meltdown in the country’s major manufacturing sectors.
Tens of thousands of metalworkers’ jobs are being lost and short time escalates with businesses including hundreds of Smotor dealerships liquidated as recessionary downward spiral sinks deeper in the motor, components and metal engineering industries.
Numsa faces a crisis of enormous depth and scale with the engineering industry reporting a total 31 048 employees affected by short time, 3 000 retrenched and effectively 12 companies closed between late last year and January 9, 2009, according to the latest metal engineering industry bargaining council (Meibc) data in the Gauteng region.
The car manufacturing industry, meanwhile has continued to shed jobs with VW plant in Uitenhage, Eastern Cape filed notices to retrench 765 employees on top of thousands of employees who were affected by the short time since April last year. The union is engaging management on voluntary retrenchment packages.
General Motors, meanwhile is set to retrench effectively another 400 workers in its Port Elizabeth-based Hammer operations unit, ostensibly for failing to achieve its brand recognition in the countr.
The retrenchments are over and above the 1 000 job cuts the company had effected late last year.
In the meanwhile Daimler Chrysler in East London has laid off 700 salaried staff members, while General Motors has radically downgraded benefits of the salaried staffers.
Employers have often blamed reduced economic demand saying it necessitated drastic reduction of working hours and job cuts to ensure their survival, Mpumzi Maqungo, Numsa national auto shop steward council chairperson has said.
The decline in the auto industry has a ripple effect on component car parts manufacturing sectors, as wheel rims manaufacturer Welfit Oddy among others, also served 550 employees with retrenchment notices in addition to Ford Engine plant also in Port Elizabeth which has unilaterally retrenched another 70 workers after the company trenched late last year about 800 workers in both its Port Elizabeth and Silverton plant in Pretoria, Maqungo said.
Nothing justifies the severity of the measures taken by the industry management, whether desired or not they took advantage of the situation through job shedding, wage and benefit cuts, instead of making the first move working in conjunction with government and labour to ensure the implementation of a vibrant industrial strategy which is not only concerned about the improving the rates of profits for the capitalist class alone, but about job and economic growth.
Numsa believe that the moment of truth has begun with the destruction of tens of thousands jobs as a consequence of allowing the power of the capital to remain unchecked, where businesses engaged wily nilly in a wave of mergers, acquisitions, price fixing and dumping to deal with global production slowdown.
Unprecedented plans to reverse the downward spiraling and job losses in the metal and engineering manufacturing industries will be unveiled in the Numsa initiated job losses conference scheduled for early March, 2009.
For further information contact:
Mziwakhe Hlangani, Numsa national spokesperson
Cell phone: 082 9407116
E-mail : mziwakheh@numsa.org.za
Source
Numsa Press Releases