Eskom and workers’ unions signed a wage deal on Tuesday, paving way for a possible resolution to the country’s worst power cuts in two years.
Struggling Eskom and its three recognised labour unions signed the agreement for a 7% salary increase a week after Eskom started implementing prolonged power cuts, blaming them on striking workers hampering efforts to bring malfunctioning power units back online.
Officials at the two biggest unions at the company, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), had earlier said they had reached an agreement in principle, while an official for the Solidarity union said an agreement with Eskom was being signed.
South Africa has faced intermittent power cuts for more than a decade that have hindered economic growth.
The stage-6 outages imposed by Eskom from last week have meant many people have been without power for at least six hours a day. The last time they were as bad was in December 2019.
Eskom had warned that even if an agreement was reached to end the strike, it faces a backlog of maintenance work that could take weeks to clear and that the system remained vulnerable to additional breakdowns. — (c) 2022 Reuters