The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) rejects the decision by the Minister of Employment and Labour, Nomakhosazana Meth, to increase the National Minimum Wage to a measly R30.23 per hour from R28.78 per hour, effective 1 March 2026. While SAFTU acknowledges that any upward adjustment to wages is necessary in the context of relentless increases in the cost of living, this increase is grossly inadequate and fails to address the material realities facing workers and their families.
In terms of the amendments, the national minimum wage is set at R30.23 for each ordinary hour worked. Farm workers and domestic workers are entitled to the same hourly rate, while workers employed under the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) remain subjected to a sub-minimum wage of R16.62 per hour. This two-tier wage system is indefensible. EPWP workers are among the poorest and most vulnerable in society, yet the state continues to legally sanction their exploitation by paying them barely half of an already insufficient minimum wage. This arrangement entrenches inequality and contradicts any claim that government policy is committed to decent work and poverty eradication.
At face value, the increase from R28.78 to R30.23 represents a nominal adjustment of approximately 5%. However, this increase does not meaningfully keep pace with the real inflation experienced by working-class households.
Official inflation figures mask the reality that the largest components of workers’ expenditure, food, electricity, transport, and municipal services, have risen far faster than headline inflation.
Electricity tariffs have increased sharply over recent years, with repeated above-inflation hikes approved by NERSA, placing an unbearable burden on households already struggling to survive. Transport costs, particularly for workers reliant on taxis and buses, continue to rise due to fuel price volatility, poor public transport infrastructure, and fare increases imposed by private taxi operators. These costs consume a growing share of workers’ wages and erode any nominal gains from the minimum wage adjustment.
An hourly wage of R30.23 translates into a monthly income of R 5913,13 per month on a 45-hour working week, which still condemns millions of workers to poverty. The working-class household food basket alone now costs between R5,000 and R6,000 per month, excluding rent, electricity, transport, education, healthcare, and debt repayments. When rising electricity tariffs and transport fares are taken into account, it becomes clear that the real purchasing power of the new minimum wage is stagnant at best and declining at worst. Workers are forced to make impossible choices between food and transport, rent and electricity, healthcare and education.
SAFTU therefore rejects the notion that inflation-linked increases are sufficient when the starting point itself is poverty wages. Linking the minimum wage to headline inflation while ignoring administered prices such as electricity, fuel, and transport entrenches a systematic erosion of workers’ living standards.
The National Minimum Wage remains disconnected from the real cost of living and continues to protect profits rather than workers’ lives. Incremental adjustments, without a decisive shift toward a genuine living wage, merely institutionalise working poverty.
The inadequacy of the minimum wage must also be understood within the broader economic context of austerity, high interest rates, deindustrialisation, and mass unemployment. These conditions have severely weakened workers’ bargaining power and turned the minimum wage into a ceiling rather than a floor. Employers increasingly cluster wages at or near the minimum, while workers absorb the full shock of rising prices, debt repayments, and collapsing public services. Weak enforcement further compounds the crisis, with millions of workers still earning below even the legally prescribed minimum.
SAFTU reiterates its long-standing position that the minimum wage must be benchmarked against the real cost of a nutritious food basket and essential household needs, including electricity, transport, housing, and municipal services, not narrow macroeconomic indicators that have as their aim to appease private capital and defend profitability, while ignoring the lived experience of workers. Wages must be sufficient to sustain dignity, health, and social reproduction.
In this regard, the current minimum wage framework has failed to lift workers out of poverty.
Therefore SAFTU calls for a clear and binding commitment to a living wage informed by the actual cost of food, transport, housing, electricity, and utilities. Government must also abandon austerity-driven policies that suppress wages while allowing electricity tariffs, transport costs, and corporate profits to rise unchecked.
Workers cannot survive on promises and token increases. R30.23 per hour does not keep pace with inflation as experienced by the working class, nor does it offset the relentless increases in electricity and transport costs. Until wages reflect the real cost of living and are supported by strong enforcement and progressive economic policy, poverty will remain a permanent feature of work in South Africa.
SAFTU will continue to fight for a living wage, decent work, and an economy that serves the needs of workers, not one that condemns them to permanent precarity.
Issued on behalf of the SAFTU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
For media inquiries, contact the National Spokesperson Newton Masuku at:
newtonm@saftu.org.za
0661682157
Media Officer
Asive Dyani
0719019564
