8,000 workers protest in S. Africa over power outages

Thousands of workers at a major power station continued their strike on Thursday amid worsening rolling blackouts across the country.

The strike by about 8,000 workers at Medupi Power Station in Limpopo province has continued for two days, resulting into the total closure of the station.

Meanwhile, the national electricity utility Eskom implemented stage-two load shedding due to high demand or urgent maintenance being done at some stations.

This is the second consecutive day that stage-two load shedding was implemented.

Eskom has three stages for load shedding. Stage one allows for up to 1,000 MW of the national load to be shed once a day. If the pressure grows, stage two for up to 2,000 MW or stage three for up to 4,000 MW would be shed. At stage two, power goes off twice a day, while at stage three, electricity could be cut two or three times a day.

The strike, organized by the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (NUMSA), was staged to press the workers' demand for complete bonus given to all workers, not only to senior managers, an end to retrenchments of workers, and a halt to racialised evictions of workers from their subsidised accommodation.

NUMSA said it is convinced that the workers reasonable demands can be resolved by Eskom, without any undue disruption of work so that it can provide the necessary and much needed power to the national grid.

"This was done in the best interest of our ailing economy and poor consumers, amidst the scandalous load-shedding that has led to our country being down-graded by rating agencies and neoliberal market institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)," NUMSA said in a statement.

"The failure by Eskom to respond to these genuine and legitimate demands of workers, will force the union to escalate its organisational muscle and power until these demands are met," the statement said.

NUMSA said that if the demands were not met, it would be compelled to pull-out its members into a full blown action, including workers at Kusile Power Station, in Mpumalanga.

Due to poor maintenance, the Medupi and Kusile stations have failed to run at full capacity, giving rise to constant rolling blackouts since November.

Despite the strike, Eskom said it is on track to officially open unit six at Medupi after maintenance.

Unit 6 is currently producing power while continuing with verification tests to ensure optimal tests. The unit is operated at various load levels to do tests. Endi