After a two-week crippling wage strike that plunged South Africa into power outages, trade unions representing Eskom workers on Tuesday accepted a wage offer from the national power utility and the strike is expected to end. Eskom has reached an agreement with the three recognized labor unions, and this "brings the Central Bargaining Council talks, the damaging, disruptive and costly wage dispute to an end, paving the way for a full return to work of all employees," the company said in a statement. Eskom had to implement prolonged power outages as a result of the strike, including high-level Stage 6 load shedding or power cut since a week ago.
The workers will receive a 7 percent increase in wage as well as an increase in housing allowances, which will cost Eskom an extra more than 1 billion South African rands (about 60 million U.S. dollars) over the one-year period, it said. The main union at Eskom, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), told Xinhua that their members have signed the wage offer and "are happy" with it. The union said it would tell its members to return to work, according to William Mabapa, NUM's acting general secretary.