Pretoria - Newly registered Liberated Metalworkers Union of South Africa (Limusa), is locking horns with car manufacturing company Toyota and the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) in its pursuit of members.
Limusa has turned to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) to launch a dispute against Toyota after the company refused to grant the new union organisational rights because of a threshold agreement it entered into with Numsa in 2001. One of the union’s founders is former Numsa President, Cedric Gina.
According to the recognition agreement, if new unions cannot prove they have a minimum of 30 percent representation of the total staff complement, Toyota SA will not allow stop order facilitation, participation in any formal in-company consultation structures or forums or access to company premises to address respective members and/or members.
In a membership statement submitted to Cosatu, when Limusa applied for affiliation a month ago, the union said it had 499 verified and 1 500 unverified members at the KZN Toyota plant. This figure has been vigorously disputed by Numsa, which claims to have around 5 000 members at the plant which employs roughly 6 000 people. Limusa would need to have at least 1 800 members to be granted organisational rights, including recognition at the plant.
The Labour Relations Act stipulates that “an employer and a registered trade union whose members are a majority of the employees employed by that employer in a workplace, or the parties to a bargaining council, may conclude a collective agreement establishing a threshold of representativeness required in respect of one or more of the organisational rights referred to in sections 12, 13 and 15”.
Limusa feels Toyota and Numsa have instead colluded to keep them out of the plant.
They argued that the inability to enter the company’s premises to reach out to potential members would predictably hold them back from achieving the required 30 percent. The union also complained about the financial implications of the inability to collect subscriptions from its registered members. The union has just more than 6 000 members nationwide, while Numsa enjoys majority support in the Metal and Engineering sectors with more than 340 000 members.
Numsa KZN Secretary Mbuso Ngubane said the agreement is not exclusive to Toyota as they, like many other unions, entered into threshold agreements in order to protect workers from “fly-by-night” unions.
“If we feared Limusa, we would have increased the threshold like we have seen other unions do in the past. The agreements have been there for years and our focus is what should be done to protect members,” he said.
Pretoria News