Cargo agents count costs of strike fallout

ALAN PEAT ALTHOUGH IT has led to a lot of crisis management in the import, export and forwarding sectors, the SAA strike has not been as critical as some newspaper reports have suggested, according to Brigitte Weisswange, director of Sabila and holder of the airfreight portfolio at the SA Association of Freight Forwarders (Saaff). While she did suggest during the week of the strike that Johannesburg International Airport (JIA) had been a shambles early on, and other airlines and cargo handling facilities had been chock-a-block, she felt by the end of the industrial action that the agents had handled all the problems very well. It had meant busy times finding alternative international flights and domestic land delivery systems to move the cargo around the country usually transported by SAA local flights, and there was a bit of a backlog of incoming cargo in Europe, but nothing happened which was disastrous on a large scale. “It has complicated issues quite substantially,” Tommy Reddy, airfreight import manager of Röhlig Grindrod, told FTW. Some freight booked to come in during the first weekend of the strike had only started to arrive later in the week, and routings for cargo were disrupted, he added. The agents also had to find alternative bookings for air cargo, and this had caused some backlogs. But there was nothing catastrophic for the airfreight industry. Bernd Jülicher of perishable specialists, Skyservices, agreed. “Yes,” he told FTW, “we did get caught in the strike, but were able to make arrangements with other airlines. “Yes, we did have a problem, but hope we have sorted it out along the normal lines.” His company did have a container load of pineapples bound for Paris delayed for a day, and one of fish for New York which went off because of delays in the landside transport to JIA. But this is no more than could be expected in the complications of a strike environment, Jülicher added. While the airfreight agents performed well, the same can’t be said for SAA management’s handling of the industrial action. “While it gave us a lot of extra work,” said another industry observer of the scene, “the only ones to lose badly in the end were SAA.” Conservative estimates of the cost to SAA put a figure of more than R25-million-a-day being lost on each of the six days of the strike - while the unions stated that 75% of the airline’s operations were grounded. For almost a whole week, the airline stuck to its story that it could not afford more than its original offer of a 5% increase, although early on in the strike it did better its offer by applying it to medical and housing - as well as an additional amount of R1 600 as part of the settlement package. The end result of all the haggling was a 6% settlement figure. Although none of the striking unions got a unanimous mandate to accept this figure, the majority agreed that this was the best compromise they could reach, and it effectively ended the strike.