Your feature article, "Big Wage Worries" ( August 3-9), refers. It focuses on a proposal made by the employers in the metal and engineering industry for a lower entry wage for new hires, but fails to mention their further proposal that wage increases should be on the agreed rand minimums for each grade instead of on the current practice of granting a percentage increase on each employee’s actual wage. Your article states that the Steel & Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa (Seifsa), one of the employer organisations involved in the negotiations, by its own admission "walked away" from both of these proposals in negotiations with the National Union of Metalworkers of SA. This was most unfortunate. I was the executive director of Seifsa for more than 20 years and in 1992 I made the mistake of supporting a proposal to change the industry’s main agreement from basing wage increases on grade minimums to percentage increases on actual wages. This change was introduced as ...
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