South African workers at carmakers including Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Co. will remain on strike next week after two days of talks with management failed to resolve a wage dispute.
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, representing 31,000 employees in the car industry, began striking Aug. 11 to demand a 15 percent pay increase, more than double the 7 percent offered by employers. The walkout is costing the industry more than 2,100 vehicles a day in lost production, according to the Automobile Manufacturers Employers Organization.
“Negotiations between the parties have brought us closer to each other but that’s not to say there is an offer on the table that brings the strike to an end,” Irvin Jim, the general secretary of Numsa, as the union is known, said in a phone interview. “We will be reporting back to our members but as it stands the strike will continue next week.”
South Africa’s car and auto-parts industry accounts for about 6 percent of gross domestic product and is the biggest manufacturing exporter. The industry, which added 427 jobs in the second quarter for a combined workforce of 31,784, is one of the few that’s creating employment in a country where one in four workers is unemployed, the highest jobless rate of 62 countries tracked by Bloomberg.
Jim declined to give details of the talks.
