Establishing the Small Business Hub
The establishment of SEIFSA’ s Small Business Hub( SBH), aimed at promoting the development of small and medium enterprises( SME), was also Mr Nyatsumba’ s brainchild. The SBH would provide cost-effective products and services that addressed the overall needs of SMEs, provide cost-effective support services that were sectorfocused and related to SME categories, identify sector and company-specific challenges, monitor trends and develop specific interventions to improve SME performance.
The products, services and solutions offered by the SBH included accounting and advisory services, statutory compliance, information technology solutions, procurement of funding, broad-based black economic empowerment and cost- effective services from SEIFSA’ s specialistled Divisions.“ To this end, we believe that we have enabled many small businesses to contribute more to South Africa’ s economic growth and job creation through, for instance, the enterprise and supplier development programme that we implemented on behalf of one of our clients.”
SAEFA defederates from SEIFSA
The end of 2016, just before the 2017 wage negotiations were due to begin, SEIFSA’ s biggest member at the time, the South African Engineers and Founders Association( SAEFA) – which had for some time not been aligned with SEIFSA and its other member Associations on a number of issues, including approaches on the position of the financially-challenged Metals and Engineering
Industries Bargaining Council and extension of collective agreements to non-parties – decided to walk away from the Federation, taking with it all its member companies.
Despite SEIFSA believing strongly that a way could be found to ensure alignment between the SAEFA leadership and SEIFSA, it became obvious that in spite of the Federation’ s numerous efforts to resolve differences with the Association, in the end some in the SAEFA leadership campaigned actively and aggressively for the Association to resign from SEIFSA.
“ Unfortunately, SAEFA’ s resignation weakened the Federation at a time when greater unity of purpose was required among employers to solve the challenges that confront the sector, including the welfare of the MEIBC and the 2017 negotiations on wages and conditions of employment. To that extent, the resignation affected SEIFSA greatly,” Mr Nyatsumba says.
However, Mr Nyatsumba states that the overall impact of SAEFA’ s defederation subsequently became minimal because the vast majority of companies which were members of the breakaway Association switched to one of the many Associations that are members of SEIFSA. Collectively, these companies employ the overwhelming majority( around 75 %) of the 45 000 employees that were represented by the 510 companies in that Association.
“ Many companies wanted to remain within SEIFSA for many reasons, apart from the fact that most of them have had a strong, productive association with the Federation over the years( in the case of some companies, for longer than
50 years). They know that, unlike any other employer organization in the sector, SEIFSA has unequalled experience in collective bargaining, employs qualified and experienced subjectmatter experts in a number of Divisions( e. g. Economics and Commercial; Industrial Relations and Legal Services; Human Capital and Skills Development; Safety, Health, Environment and Quality, etc.) and offers a series of important products and services( like the unique SEIFSA Prices and Index Pages) which they access at a discounted price.”
Mr Nyatsumba also states that SEIFSA still represents 23 loyal employer Associations, which collectively employ the majority of factory workers( in excess of 175 000) in the metals and engineering sector and remains the authoritative voice of employers in the sector, representing them in collective bargaining and lobbying on their behalf.
“ SEIFSA remains the only employer representative in the sector with healthy relations with all stakeholders, including labour and the Government, and believes firmly that it will take a solid partnership among Government, business and labour to get South Africa to realize its economic potential.”
The 2017 three-year wage agreement
On 23 August 2017, following four months of intensive talks – first within the Metals and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council wherein SEIFSA worked closely with all the
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