About 300 union members were expected to vote at the university staff lounge yesterday on whether to strike or not. UBASSSU's chairperson, Dr Never Tshabang explained that after the announcement of the results, they will convene a meeting today to crystallise their demands before giving the management a 48-hour strike notice. "The feasible day that we are looking at to down tools will be Monday to give the management time to respond to our demands," Tshabang said. He stated that the Commissioner of Labour cleared them on Monday to go ahead with the strike.
At the centre of the collapsed negotiations are disagreements over the professoriate pay levels and salary increment. Tshabang said that once a percentage is awarded to a scale/band, it should be applied equally across the scale/band to maintain internal relativities. He said management's use of scale/band average would disadvantage others in the same scale/band by awarding minus or zero increase. He said the general feeling is that the use of average would also lump up notches and remove the legitimate gaps between and among differing salaries as well as internal relativities.
The union asserted that staff salaries have been eroded over time and that management's position that some employees are over paid is without merit. The union said that management has made flawed calculations in some of the costings of different pay scenarios and made a deliberate attempt to inflate the total cost of the particular scenario and limit the benefit to a select few.
