From Reuters

South Africa should adjust labour laws so union members have to vote before striking, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Thursday, suggesting the government may push ahead with reforms to curb damaging industrial action.

A strike this year in the platinum sector, the longest and costliest in South Africa’s history, dragged the continent’s most advanced economy into contraction and led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its sovereign credit rating.

Separately, the country’s biggest union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), stopped work on July 2 to demand higher wages, halting output at several car factories.

The present system allows unions to declare a dispute with employers as soon as wage talks stall, and then call a strike without a ballot, giving employers just 48 hours’ notice.

Companies and politicians often argue that workers want to return to work but are intimidated into extending strikes by powerful union leaders.

“I would take a strike ballot as a normal type of process in the governance of strikes … I am hugely in support of that,” said Ramaphosa, a trade unionist-turned-billionaire seen as the most likely successor to President Jacob Zuma.

“In view of the length of strikes that we’ve seen … that is a matter that should be debated,” he told reporters in Cape Town, although added that any reforms should be handled “sensitively”.

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