The Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) and the management of Denel have two weeks to respond to a memorandum of demand the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) submitted to them on Friday.
Numsa demands that the department intervenes in plans by Denel to shed employees and implement salary cuts. The union also rejected plans to sell off Denel.
Numsa says selling off the company will cost employees their jobs.
Numsa Secretary-General Irvin Jim handed the memorandum of demands over to DPE and Denel representatives in Pretoria. “We demand that the minister and the senior leadership of Denel must with speed address the current and embarrassing situation, historical injustice, where the poor, lowest paid workers in Denel are excluded and discriminated against in accessing medical aid, purely because the medical aid is the medical aid of the elite. We demand that the current wage anomalies that are allowed to continue in Denel, especially amongst artisans, and lowest earning be fixed with serious urgency.”
