South Africa: SABMiller’s beer unit not game for a strike

SABMiller Plc’s South African beer division workers have “little appetite” to join a strike started two weeks ago by employees at the company’s Amalgamated Beverage Industries Ltd. unit, Bloomberg reported on January, 6.

The company’s local beer division employs 5,567 workers, 1,825 of whom are members of the Food and Allied Workers’ Union, the labor union leading the ABI strike, Johannesburg-based SAB said in an e-mailed statement on January, 6.

SAB doesn’t expect any impact on its operations from planned labor action starting at the beer unit from tomorrow, the company said.

FAWU planned to expand a strike started Dec. 22 at ABI over a wage dispute to SAB’s beer division and three other Coca-Cola Co. bottlers in the country from tomorrow. Disruptions at ABI because of the strike have been limited with 66 percent of its 3,813 employees at work, the company said.

The labor action is aimed at causing a soft-drink shortage and pressuring ABI into meeting the union’s demands for a 9.5 percent salary increase, a 45-hour working week and overtime pay for weekend work, Katishi Masemola, general secretary of the Food and Allied Workers Union, said.

ABI has offered to raise salaries by 7.8 percent, matching the increase awarded to SAB beer workers in July, while also increasing Christmas payments and mobile-phone and educational-support benefits. South African inflation in November measured 5.8 percent.

Workers in the soft drinks unit want their salaries to “catch up with those in the beer division,” Masemola said.

SABMiller earns 18 percent of its revenue from South Africa while ABI accounts for about 37 percent of the South African unit’s total volumes.

06 January, 2010