By Alexander Winning

JOHANNESBURG, (Reuters) – South Africa’s largest metalworkers union announced on Thursday it accepted a three year wage offer in the engineering and steel sectors. This paved the way for a strike.

NUMSA has approximately 155,000 members. It started a strike to demand higher wages in early February. This move hit production at BMW and threatened additional auto-assembler lines.

Union members had demanded an 8.8% increase in wages across all sectors from the employer the first year and inflation plus 2.2% the second, third and fourth years.

The Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa offered only 4.4% in 2021 and an inflation plus 0.5% 2022. Before talks ended, they also provided inflation plus 1.1% for the third year.

The September annual inflation reading was 5.0%.

NUMSA released a statement Thursday stating that the deal it made with SEIFSA would allow workers in the lowest paid grades to be eligible for an annual 6% pay increase at scheduled rates over three years. However, higher-paid employees would receive annual increases of between 5.5% and 5%.

The settlement agreement was reached after the round of negotiations. It said that it called on employers to agree with its members to go back to work as soon as possible, starting from Friday 22 Oct and ending no later than Monday.

If the strike continued for too long, it was feared that the strike could cause major damage to South Africa’s auto export sector. This sector is currently trying to rebound from the steep drop in sales caused by the COVID-19 epidemic.