![[South Africa] Department of Labour releases status of South African industrial strikes report](strike.jpg)
[South Africa] Department of Labour releases status of South African industrial strikes report
The department of Labour has launched an industrial action report that provides an analysis of strike activities in the South African labour market using the Department of Labour strike database.
The strike statistical information is compiled to respond to the need of a variety of individuals with an interest in South Africa's industrial relations environment including government departments, unions, employers, business, international organisations, research institutes, NGO's and students.
The Industrial Action Report provides a ten year comparative analysis as compared to previous releases, e.g., Five year analysis.
The purpose was to observe how all key indicators perform in line with various shocks in the South African economy over a 10 year period. In this respect, there are five key measures of strikes that are covered in the report, namely, number of industrial actions, working days lost, time-loss ratio, working hours lost and wages lost.
Following this, the number of strikes, working days lost and number of workers involved in strike in South Africa fluctuated in the past ten years from 2005 to 2015 with an annual average of 85 strike incidents, 5.2 million working days lost and 335 000 workers involved per annum respectively.
A trend in strikes occurrence has been recorded in the mining (gold and platinum) community, manufacturing and transport industries. Nevertheless, the mining industry has shown relatively higher working days lost as compared to other industries from 2013-2015;
Over the same period 2013 -2015, the lowest number of strikes was seen in the Finance and Utilities industries;
An increase in the number of work stoppages from all economic sectors was also observed between 2014 and 2015. This represents almost 25 per cent of strike increase over the same period. However, there was an 8 percent increase in strikes increase over the 10 year analysis period. This may be regarded as insignificant;
In 2015, we observed that 55 percent of the total strikes were unprotected strikes (not complying with the LRA) as compared to 48 percent observed in 2014;
The wages lost decreased dramatically from R6.1 billion in 2014 to R116 million in 2015. This represents a decrease of 98 percent in wages lost in the economy. Over the 10 year analysis period, it represents 62 percent in wages lost. The variation in wages lost could be attributed to the number of workers who participated in strikes and the duration of strikes for a particular period.
