05/11/2025
Publication: CWAO and SWF
Author: Press Writer
Community members in solidarity with striking workers outside the company's Alrode plant in Jburg!
Photo credit: Casual Workers' Advice Office.
For more information, call
Simunye Workers Forum on +27 62 047 2668 or +27 82 8121934.
---------------------------------------
The workers of CHEP (blue pallet maker) in Jet Park have been on a protected strike since 21 August. Since the strike began, the CHEP bosses shut down production at Jet Park and moved it to their Alrode plant. Hence, community members protested there today in solidarity with striking workers.
CHEP is owned by an Australian supply chain and logistics company, Brambles. CHEP SA has refused to increase workers' wages and breached the South African labour law by refusing to make long-standing workers permanent.
Some of the striking workers are paid as little as R9000 per month before tax, and spend more than half their meagre pay cheque on public transport to get to work and back.
This is 957 times the salary of the lowly paid workers at CHEP SA’s Jet Park warehouse!
Brambles is also breaching labour laws. Since 2015, the labour laws have said that client companies must make labour broker workers permanent after three months on the job.
CHEP SA has refused to do this – some workers have been working there for 18 years and are still casual labourers.
The company is very brazen about this and describes the labour broker it continues to use, C-Force, as a “service provider”, and not a labour broker. Yet C-Force clearly describes itself as a labour broker on its website (https://www.c-force.co.za/).
Labour law in any case does not even allow “service providers” to “provide” workers to a client company for longer than three months anyway – the same rules apply to these companies.
The strike continues.
