The South African Post Office (SAPO) and trade unions have reached an agreement over salary increases and other issues, bringing an end to a strike which started on July 3.
According to a statement issued by SAPO on Wednesday evening, an agreement was signed between the post office, the Communication Workers Union (CWU), the Democratic Postal Workers Union (Depacu), and the SA Postal Workers Union (Sapwu).
In terms of the agreement, employees across the board will receive a salary increase of 6.5%, backdated to April 1, 2018. Workers demanded a 12% increase, but SAPO could only offer a 6% increase, News24 previously reported.
Additionally, the contracted working hours for permanent part-time employees, have been moved from 21.5 hours per week to 27.5 hours per week. SAPO said that 500 of these positions will be phased in as permanent full-time employees, following an “appropriate process”.
SAPO said the accumulated mail would take roughly 20 work days to be processed.
Assurances were also given for the payments to social grant beneficiaries, these were halted due to the strike.
So far the post office has migrated 2.2 million beneficiaries of the South Africa Social Security Agency (SASSA) to the SASSA/SAPO issued gold card.
“We want to assure all beneficiaries that the IT challenges that impacted last month’s payment run have been resolved,” SAPO said.