 The beleaguered South African airways is in the eye of a storm again. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA and the South African Cabin Crew Association SACA have demanded transparency regarding the restructuring of the national carrier. As per the restructuring plan, 51% of ownership of SAA was sold to the Takatsu Consortium at an undisclosed price. The unions are demanding that the details of this sale be made public as workers have suffered the most during the process of restructuring. Pagamele Hrubimajola of NUMSA explains some of the concerns the unions have. NUMSA at South African airways is in coalition with another trade union, which is the South African Cabin Crew Association. So when we issue statements and when we do press interviews, we're not just speaking on behalf of NUMSA, but we also speak on behalf of SACA, which is the South African Cabin Crew Association. From the moment that a discussion began about an equity partner for SAA, and that discussion took place, I would say formally, during the consultations which the Department of Public Enterprises was engaging on with unions during the business rescue process in the early days. As trade unions NUMSA and SACA, we were very adamant from day one that if a decision has been taken that SAA must be given to a strategic equity partner, then that entire process must be a transparent process. The choice of the equity partner should occur in public. In other words, the whole process of even deciding who that equity partner is should take place in public. The entire vetting process and the details thereof should be made available to the public. All of those companies which express an interest should be, that information should be given to the public because SAA is not a private company. It's a state-owned entity. And Parliament in fact should have been involved in this process to even agree to the sale of SAA. We haven't even had a parliamentary process which would have enabled the sale of SAA, which we feel is completely, we can say flawed because this is a state-owned entity. And basically government is selling it a portion of its shareholding. And because of that, and this is an entity which has been funded by the state and by public money, the public must know absolutely everything about this deal. From the time that we raise these concerns, even at that stage, we were dismissed by the Department of Public Enterprises. And even as I speak to you today, the unions have no answers to many of the questions that the public are now asking themselves about this deal. For example, how did they come to the agreement that they must sell SAA for 3 billion rand? When was that evaluation done to establish the value of the airline? There's a whole host of questions around this deal, around the so-called due diligence that DPE keeps telling us it's done. How can we trust and believe that when they have been hiding, that's the best word we can use, they've been hiding information because they refuse to disclose. We are now at the point as unions where we have lodged a dispute and we now have to take legal steps through private arbitration in order to get that information because the Department of Public Enterprises refuses to be forthright and disclose information which we believe is in the public interest and which the public has every right to have. Alongside these issues, unions are also furious at the proposal to dismiss 225 more workers. This is despite the fact that the unions had saved these jobs and the restructuring plan had provided for them to be trained, upskilled and eventually reabsorbed into SAA. Why were these workers dismissed? We're very disappointed about what the SAA management is doing at the moment. To us, it is further evidence that this SAA is not a new SAA. It's an SAA that still has the same problems as the old SAA where you have an executive management that is just a law unto itself. Unions, NUMSA and SACA negotiated during business rescue plan that a training law scheme which is basically a social plan for an additional number of approximately a thousand workers would be implemented. On top of the 700 or so which SAA started off with, there would be an additional pool of approximately a thousand workers from which SAA could recruit as it ramps up. As it adds new routes, then it can obviously rehire some of these workers and these workers would be going through a 12-month reskilling and training program in the meantime. Their training would not just be limited to everything to do with aviation, but it would be basically allow them to do anything so that in case they do not get absorbed by the airline, they have other skills and are able to be absorbed in other sectors. Unfortunately, workers were informed at the end of February that as of the end of March, this training law scheme will come to an end and all more than 200 of them face dismissal. SAA claims that the reason the training law scheme was not implemented is because number one, they claim the CCMA was unable to participate. Number two, they claim that the training and education authority, the TITA, T-E-T-A, was also unable to assist or participate. As Numsan Saka, we feel very strongly that SAA is not being forthright and telling the full story because what we know for a fact is that the training and education authority was more than willing to assist with the training of workers. What they needed from SAA was for SAA to cooperate with them. And it seems that they did not get cooperation from SAA management when it came to the training. SAA wanted to control the training. TITA would not allow SAA to control the training and the funding for the training, which of course makes perfect sense. That is how it operates. And because of that, that's actually why the project fell apart. At the same time, the part of the reason why the CCMA could not participate is because SAA has not produced financials for more than three years. So again, the same issues that unions have raised before, that Numsan Saka have raised before, which is that SAA was collapsed by mismanagement and corruption. We're seeing that again. The mismanagement of the training layoff scheme is about to result in the dismissal of more than 200 workers. And we feel that that is completely unacceptable and we're demanding DPE to intervene because this was a social plan which we negotiated with them, with their approval. And SAA is basically failing to uphold a promise that it made. Thirdly, and this is also another issue which has become a burning issue for members, is that SAA executive management have rehired those workers who had taken voluntary severance packages. Now basically, that voluntary severance package, if you signed for a voluntary severance package, it means that you gave up your rights as an employee. You no longer intend to work for the company you've left. So what SAA did was instead of hiring workers from the training layoff scheme, it went and hired managers who had taken voluntary severance packages. They've been rehired. We have questions about the processes which were used to rehire these managers. It does not seem that proper human resources protocols were followed. And what was most alarming is that SAA managers have gifted themselves very generous salary packages, whilst workers have had their salaries slashed by 30%. Benefits like pension fund and medical aid have been taken away. And yet you have this bloated group of managers, more than 200 managing 700 employees who have very, very bloated packages. And in our view, who cannot justify why their packages are so generous. So these are all issues which we contained in our memorandum, which we handed to the Department of Public Enterprises last week when we picketed. We are still waiting for feedback from them in terms of how they're going to assist us to deal with these matters going forward. The unions have also expressed unhappiness over the role of the government. What stand has it taken during the current crisis? We are quite disappointed with the attitude of government. It's very sad that workers have to fight like this just for government to do the right thing. The most painful thing about last week's picket was hearing directly from workers themselves, talking about how much suffering they've endured in order to defend this airline. Because they love SAA, many of them did not take the packages. Some of them decided to stay. And they now literally cannot afford to work there. They cannot survive on what they earn. I mean, you had a cabin crew member who's been at SAA for more than 34 years, who's earning the salary of an entry level. You have of an entry level staffer. You have a worker who talks about the fact that SAA cabin crew staff risks their lives during the height of the lockdown, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when we didn't know much about the virus. They volunteered to go and rescue South Africans who were stranded in other countries. And they decided to do that knowing that they could possibly get sick, knowing that they would be treated badly by their communities. Because at that stage, there was a lot of fear about the virus. And people were basically treated badly, rejected by their communities for going to China. But workers at SAA were brave enough to do what the South African army could not do. They got on planes, they flew to Wuhan, and they brought stranded South Africans back. And the reward that they got for the sacrifices that they made was for this government to embark on this very painful retrenchment process of retrenching more than 3,000 workers. And during the process of restructuring the airline, forcing thousands of families to go without salaries during a pandemic and a lockdown. So it really has been truly disappointing how the SAA government has treated workers. They've been shocking in their treatment. They've treated them very badly. We are hoping that if DPE is true to its word in terms of presenting itself as an organization that cares about transparency, that cares about routing out mismanagement and corruption, that Minister Pravin Gordhan will stand by his word and will defend this airline and will intervene to prevent further job losses and will force the management to do the right thing because a lot of pain has been experienced for this airline to be turned around. And the only people so far who are suffering are ordinary workers and their families.