Big trouble for Eskom as workers demand more money
Two of South Africa’s biggest trade unions have rejected an improved 6% salary increase offer from state-owned power utility Eskom, their representatives said on Tuesday.
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.
The company began talks with three major unions last year and last month offered a pay increase of 5.5%.
That was raised to 6% during a third round of talks last week but was rejected by National Union of Mineworkers members, union spokesperson Livhuwani Mammburu said on Tuesday.
The NUM had made a revised demand for 12%, reduced from an initial 15%, far above South African annual inflation that stood at 3.6% in December.
“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.
Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), said his union had also rejected the offer.
“We don’t accept the current offer on the table,” he said, adding that further talks were scheduled for Thursday.
A third union, Solidarity, declined to comment, citing the sensitive state of negotiations. An Eskom spokesperson did not immediately respond to Reuters questions.
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.
Eskom’s average employee earns far more than workers in other state-owned companies, including several which generally require a high level of technically specialised capabilities.
Eskom’s 2025 financial year report showed that the power utility incurred an average cost of R1.026 million per employee, 12.4% higher than in the previous year.
The increase was due to several factors, including a 7% annual salary adjustment and the return of short-term performance incentives.
MyBroadband previously benchmarked the utility’s cost per employee against nine other prominent state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in 2025.
Eskom’s number was the highest by a substantial margin. The company with the second-highest average cost per employee was Telkom, which is partially privatised.
In its 2025 financial year, Telkom’s average cost per employee was R926,806, about R100,000 less than Eskom’s.
(With Reuters)
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