Two of South Africa’s (SA) biggest trade unions have rejected an improved 6% salary increase offer from state-owned power utility Eskom, their representatives said this Tuesday.<\/p>\n
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Eskom has dragged on Africa’s largest economy for years, owing to power cuts and the company’s financial troubles, but improved performance from its coal-fired power stations has halted outages and brought the first annual profit in eight years.<\/p>\n
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The company began talks with three major unions last year and last month offered a pay increase of 5.5%.<\/p>\n
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That was raised to 6% during a third round of talks last week but was rejected by National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) members, union Spokesperson Livhuwani Mammburu said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
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The NUM had made a revised demand for 12%, reduced from an initial 15%, far above SA annual inflation that stood at 3.6% in December.<\/p>\n
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“It’s not Eskom management that ended load-shedding (power cuts), it’s the workers; and we feel that they must be rewarded for their hard work,” Mammburu said.<\/p>\n
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Irvin Jim, General Secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (NUMSA), said his union had also rejected the offer.<\/p>\n
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“We don’t accept the current offer on the table,” he said, adding that further talks were scheduled for Thursday.<\/p>\n
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A third union, Solidarity, declined to comment, citing the sensitive state of negotiations.<\/p>\n
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An Eskom Spokesperson did not immediately respond to Reuters<\/em> questions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Eskom, which reached a three-year pay deal in 2023 that increased non-managerial employees’ salaries by 7% each year, is seeking another multi-year wage deal.<\/p>\n –Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22336,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[44],"class_list":["post-23885","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-finance","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Two of SA's biggest trade unions have rejected an improved 6% salary increase offer from state-owned power utility Eskom","published_date":"2026-02-17 15:47:10","news_description":"Two of SA's biggest trade unions have rejected an improved 6% salary increase offer from state-owned power utility Eskom","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26721,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23885\/revisions\/26721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=23885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}