Sale of non-core business raises concern JOY ORLEK THE SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) has sent out a strong message to Transnet over the proposed sale of non-core business units. This follows last week’s announcement by chief executive Maria Ramos that the Group would in future focus on ports, rail and pipelines, retaining some engineering capacity like Transwerk and Protekon. “That means that everything else has to exit,” said Satawu general secretary Randall Howard, “and there will be massive resistance from our members to this move.” He said Satawu remained opposed to privatisation in ideological terms. “We have no empirical evidence that privatisation will bring benefits to the workers. “We also don’t believe the neo-liberal mantra that says that everything that is private is efficient. “And while we laud the Transnet turnaround which is positive for the organisation, its employees and the economy, our workers are concerned about losing their jobs.” But Howard made it clear that Satawu was willing to engage with government and Transnet on the question. “The purpose of our engagement will be to bring this restructuring process to a definitive close at some stage. “Moreover, we regard government’s position on restructuring as nothing more than a proposal at this point. It’s not to be imposed on us under any circumstances.” Satawu is not averse to the idea of transferring certain assets like Metrorail and SAA out of Transnet, as long as they remain state-owned. “But if they are to be transferred to the private sector, whatever model is chosen, the precondition would be job guarantees. We don’t see closure as an option for any business and will fight very hard for our members’ jobs.” With regard to SAA Howard acknowledged the significant financial turnaround. “The new CEO has broken with the Andre Viljoen era where profits were generated by selling off assets. These results come from an improvement in basic efficiencies and cost containment, all of which has been achieved without job losses, other than voluntary packages for executive managers. And we are insensitive to jobs being lost at that level.” On the port concessioning question, Howard was emphatic. From Satawu’s point of view concessioning is off the table. “Fundamentally we are saying that ports are strategic assets. They have an important economic role to play and we are not interested in discussing privatisation. “We are not averse to a public private partnership as long as there are no job losses.” Randall believes that investment in infrastructure and equipment has already improved productivity over the past two years. “These continuous noises about privatisation and concessioning are about multinational capital wanting to do what they do all over the world; take over businesses, use the assets, use the infrastructure, and when they’ve raped it enough, leave without any commitment to our country, and we won’t have that. South Africa is not the sales house of the world.”
