The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) welcomes the amendments to the Companies Act, which forces companies to disclose the remuneration given to directors and prescribed officers, and disparities between their highest and lowest-paid employees, including the detail on median and average remunerations.
This change will come dearly to trade union negotiators, who will have this information at their disposal during wage negotiations. In the past, company negotiators refused to share this information, forcing trade unions to apply for access to information; a cumbersome process that delayed the wage negotiations and derailed the bargaining process. The availability of such information will not only help to avoid the prolonged process of accessing this crucial information but will arm the trade union negotiators to factor this information in wage bargaining. It usually appears ridiculous for workers to make inflation-linked wage demands, including the demand for profit sharing because the disparities in remuneration between executives and ordinary workers were not known to the public. This should strengthen the case for workers in the court of public opinion, including to nullify the preposterous commentaries of bourgeois economists who always lament that our wage demands are unrealistic.
Moreover, the revelation of remuneration “between the highest 5% and lowest 5% of paid employees” will expose one of the sources of the inequalities in this country. Income inequalities, before factoring in other factors of inequality, have been exposed by Oxfam South Africa and Labour Research Service (LRS). These organisations have exposed in the past that it would take less than 24 hours for a CEO to earn what ordinary workers will earn in a year. Measured through their annual pay, a shareholder organisation, Just Share, reported in June of 2023 that Shoprite’s CEO-ordinary worker pay-parity translates into an average worker earning in 1 081 years what a CEO earned in 2022 alone.
Therefore, unlike scanty information on income inequalities based on companies that willingly published their executives, we will now have this information available so that we can gauge the income inequalities.
