World Cup Could Be Winning Card

Hotel di Singapura - Wage negotiations are an emotional time as workers try to extract the maximum they can from employers while employers try to extract the maximum from workers.

Tempat Wisata - This year workers will be asked to consider the heavy recent job losses, which topped 870 000 last year, and the lower consumer inflation rate, which last month stood at 5.7 percent, as well as the toll the recession has had on company profits.

But Solidarity has warned that although the tough times will be considered and companies' specific circumstances taken into account, businesses must not think they can play the recession as a trump card.

"We have the figures and we will not hesitate to force wealthy companies to let employees share in their successes," says Jaco Kleynhans, Solidarity's spokesman.

Several companies last year secured multi-year agreements, including Telkom, Eskom, the Chamber of Mines (for large coal and gold producers) and the Metal and Engineering Bargaining Council, meaning that this year there will be no negotiations in these firms or sectors. But for other industries the sabre rattling has begun as the negotiating season approaches.

Firms that secured multi-year agreements must be sighing with relief, especially as most wage talks occur in winter and so will coincide with the World Cup.

It seems the World Cup could be the very trump card that unions need in these tough times to negotiate a better deal. No company is likely to want its name associated with strike action that may tarnish the country's image. But then again strikes don't happen at inconvenient times only in South Africa.

Last year, Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of the World Cup Local Organising Committee, was reported as saying that during the 2007 rugby World Cup in France he had to walk to the stadium because French transport workers were on strike.

"In France that's just accepted, and everyone gets on with it. In South Africa the media vilify, demean and insult the workers. Sadly, in relation to hosting this event, South Africa is being seen through a different lens from other countries."



kulula.com

Top marks for the marketing genius of low-cost airline kulula.com, whose brush with the law laid down by world soccer governing body Fifa shows no sign of abating.

If anything, kulula has made Fifa's draconian stipulations to protect its official sponsors from the ambush marketing of non-sponsors look sillier by the minute.

The airline's tongue-in-cheek print advert, titled "Unofficial carrier of the 'you-know-what'" earned the airline a lawyer's letter from Fifa this month, in which kulula was warned it had infringed on several trademarks Fifa had registered. Fifa took exception to the airline's repeated use of the South African flag, footballs and vuvuzelas, among other things.

Kulula responded this week with a new print advert that goes to great lengths to dissociate itself from the World Cup. It is titled: "Not next year, not last year, but somewhere in between", a reference, presumably, to one of the variations of the event date that Fifa has registered in its name.

In a similar format to the advert that was canned, kulula's new ad is peppered with illustrations and accompanying labels. For instance, pictures of several long instruments are labelled "definitely, definitely a golf tee", while a drape of cloth is referred to as "Colourful Beach Towel? Flag?". A picture of the Cape Town football stadium has made way for that of the "Storms River Suspension Bridge". Rugby, tennis and running are given a mention.

Thus far there has been no word on the new advert from Fifa, but don't necessarily rule out another dour response from the recipient of sports sponsorship's big bucks.



Parliament

All the opposition parties missed a beat during question time for President Jacob Zuma when they failed to raise the issue of the mooted nationalisation of farm land which has been causing a major debate in farming circles and the Afrikaans press.

Asked by DA MP Dion George about nationalisation in general, Zuma said: "Government policy is not nationalisation and this is what we have explained, as well when we were in Great Britain."

The president emphasised that whether nationalisation was raised by the ANC Youth League "or whoever", it was their democratic right to voice their views. This, the president noted, was very different from the time when the mention of nationalisation would land one on Robben Island. He suggested that the debate over nationalisation should be conducted with youth league leader Julius Malema. Opposition parties could do so and try to prove that Malema "is wrong" on nationalisation.

But it emerged later during the debate on the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform budget vote in an extended public committee that this department has the issue of nationalisation of farmland high on the agenda. The minister, Gugile Nkwinti, while denying that nationalisation was a plan, referred instead to farm land as a state asset.

Nkwinti then went on to say that there were three options for land, which would be proposed in the upcoming green paper to be put to Parliament by the end of next month. These options would be: state land under leasehold, private land under freehold and what he called "precarious tenure". This was land owned by foreigners but which was not used productively. The latter would have to be linked to productivity and partnership models with South African citizens in order to make it a little less precarious.

Presumably, if the combined opposition had taken its cue and realised that land nationalisation was a hot potato, Zuma would have merely said that there was a need for a debate on the issue but it was not policy. But even the leader of the opposition, Athol Trollip, who owns a farm in the Eastern Cape, did not raise the issue.