JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - South African public workers, who last week staged one of the country's biggest strikes in a decade, postponed a wave of protests set to begin Monday after the government offered a slightly better wage deal.
"We are going to work for two days from Monday and the strike action is off for the moment," Thulas Nxesi, general secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers' Union told AFP.
"The latest government offer is 6.2 percent for this year and for the next two years it will be inflation plus 0.4 percent," he said, after eight labour unions held talks with the government Sunday to avert the strikes set for Monday and Tuesday.
The unions and the government are trying to resolve a dispute over workers' demands for a seven-percent wage increase.
The government had been offering six percent and warned there is no more money in the coffers to bolster the salaries of South Africa's 1.1 million public sector workers.
The unions complain that public sector employees are underpaid with the average gross salaries of police officers, teachers and nurses standing at around 5,000 rand (760 dollars,620 euros) per month.
The country's largest labour federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), said about 700,000 workers stayed away from work on Thursday -- one of the biggest strikes since the end of apartheid 10 years ago.
But the government said only about 250,000 public sector workers took part in the stayaway.
In August 1999, some 400,000 public servants took to the streets but they failed in pushing the government into increasing its wage offer. That was the largest strike since the first democratic elections in 1994 which saw the African National Congress voted into power.