In the conclusion of the protracted strike at the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), the National Education, Health, and Allied Workers’ Union Nehawu) yesterday revealed faultlines in the segmentation of entities under the Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition (dtic).
Nehawu also alleged serious governance breaches at the SABS, which were leading to corruption.
Nehawu’s deputy secretary-general, December Mavuso, speaking in the aftermath of the two-week strike that has finally been resolved with the intervention of Trade, Industry, and Competition Parks Minister Parks Tau.
Mavuso said there was a need for harmonisation of remuneration and benefits, as well as centralised bargaining at the dtic. The polarised structures in the dtic were resulting in “department hopping”, he claimed.
“There are a lot of issues at the SABS and the other entities at the department, which we raised with the minister. We hold the view as a union that creating so many agencies is bankrupting the fiscus. There is a need to harmonise and have central bargaining,” Mavuso said.
“The boards and CEOs decide on their own what to pay and you (union) are negotiating with one entity and next door there are negotiations with another, and the outcomes may be different. The disparity is unhealthy for entities under the same department,” he said.
Meanwhile, SABS workers from the picket lines also raised concerns of unilateral changes to the structure, which the union said had resulted in the collapse of specialised tiers including the test house, certification, and standard writers to a technical-level.
Concerns were also raised that instability at the board and executive-level had resulted in inefficiencies leading to suspension of accreditation for some of the SABS’s services to the construction sector. The union claimed that the SABS had lost accreditation of its cement labs for the second time.
The workers charged that the board had deliberately not appointed a CEO in the past 18 months so that they could revolve and rotate the current executives so that accountability for alleged corruption was shifted.
They also allege that the collapse of the performance management system and processes for the past eight years years were deliberate to make the entity dysfunctional in order to to aid executive corruption.
The dtic had failed to comment at the time of publication.
However, the South African National Accreditation Systems (Sanas) said it was not aware of the reported problems with the SABS accreditations.
“The cement laboratory was last re-assessed in December, 2023 and is currently in good standing with Sanas. We are not aware of any competency issues within the laboratory. We further confirm that the laboratory is not under suspension,” said Sanas marketing and communications director, Tshenolo Molamu.
Meanwhile, the Concrete Manufacturers Association (CMA) confirmed that it had caught the windfall of accreditation of particular products in the past eight years, which had been the reserve of the SABS after private companies were frustrated by the delays.
“For about eight years or so members came to the CMA and said they had problems with the SABS, and so we registered a PTY, and we do certification and accreditation.
“We as the CMA have been doing the accreditation of pre-cast products for the past eight years and I can say – without revealing our business – that we have done maybe 80% of what should have been done by the SABS, but then pre-cast is a slice of the whole work that they do,” said the official who declined to be named.
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