The South African Post Office says it is encouraged by the increased return of employees to work following a settlement with unions.

“The number of South African Post Office employees that have heeded the call to return to work following a wage settlement reached with two labour unions has increased sharply. The South African Post Office announced last week that it had reached a 6.5% wage settlement with the South African Postal and Allied Workers Union (Sapawu) and the Democratic Postal and Communications Union (Depacu), which collectively represent 61% of the employees at bargaining level,” it said in a statement.

According to the leader of the intervention team appointed by the Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Affairs to stabilise the South African Post Office, Simo Lushaba, there has been a 52% improvement on the absenteeism rate since Friday.

“We are still looking at further improvements with the pending shifts during the day. We are fast moving towards full capacity... This demonstrates that our projections of returning the South African Post Office’s operations to full capacity in the near future are in sight. We would like to thank all the role players involved in this process,” said Lushaba.

South African Post Office operations are also improving, particularly given that Tshwane Mail and Witspos are fully functional. These are the main sorting centres in Gauteng. Both these centres, alongside the Johannesburg International Mail Centre, recorded 100% employee attendance on Monday morning.

The Post Office is confident that the employee attendance trend will continue, signalling that “we are on course to full operations and to effectively process the mail backlog caused by the strike”, said Lushaba.

He said it will take around 22 days to process and deliver the mail backlog.

“Of the 673 [employees] that had been absent last Friday, 331 have reported to their posts this morning and we expect this figure to gradually improve during the course of the day. We still encourage the remaining employees to return to work,” said Lushaba.