[sustran] Spoornet crisis in South Africa (fwd)

[Eric Bruun]

AFP wrote:
>
>
>    CAPE TOWN, Sept 21 (AFP) - Spoornet, South Africa's loss-making
> state railway company, is planning to decommission several
> unprofitable lines and shed at least 20,000 jobs, an official
> announced Tuesday.
>    Saki Macozoma, managing director of parent company Transnet,
> told parliament that three alternative proposals for cutting rail
> lines would be put to trade unions and government soon.
>    Under the most drastic of the proposals, the railway line from
> Johannesburt to the central city of Bloemfontein would be
> decommissioned in the shakeup, which would cost some 27,000 jobs
> overall.
>    A softer option would be to keep that line and save some 7,000
> jobs, but it was not clear whether the struggling rail provider
> could afford that.
>    Transnet in July posted losses of 462 million rand (75 million
> dollars) for the 1998-99 financial year. More than a quarter of the
> money was lost by Spoornet.
>    Job losses have long been on the cards at Transnet. When it
> released its financial report in July, the company announced that it
> was mulling cutting tens of thousands of jobs.
>    When trade unions threatened large-scale labour action,
> government put the plans on hold.
>    Macozoma Tuesday said he regretted that Spoornet, Africa's
> biggest rail provider, had not cut its workforce five years ago,
> when South Africa was undergoing the change from an apartheid state
> to a democracy.
>    "It would have been less painful," he told reporters.
>


---End of forwarded mail from carol at sgimess.physics.upenn.edu

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