The City of Johannesburg (CoJ) finally bowed down to pressure from the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA),who threatened them with a strike following failure to pay the drivers' salaries. The drivers' salaries were due on the 25th of October but the drivers were only paid this morning.

This follows the intervention of the union yesterday where they threatened to down tools for good if CoJ failed to pay the bus operating companies Pio Trans and Letsamaiso ,which manage the buses' operations. On Wednesday afternoon, Rea Vaya bus drivers downed tools due to a labour dispute which led to commuters being left stranded. The bus operators were supposed to be paid their salaries by the 25th of October. Numsa spokesperson Phakamile Hlubi-Majola said that the workers cannot be expected to show up for work when they have not been paid their salaries. "How can they feed their families, and pay for petrol and public transportation to go to work when they have not been paid? We condemn the City of Joburg for failing workers and for failing the public because of their gross incompetence, " Hlubi-Majola said yesterday.

CoJ transport department spokesperson, Benny Makgoga, confirmed that the workers were paid. "There has been a delay in the payment process and the City has since paid Pio Trans and services resumed this morning," Makgoga said. Hlubi-Majola said as Numsa, they hope that the CoJ will prevent delays like this from happening in future. "We are demanding that there must be a final resolution to this problem because workers' salaries have been delayed almost every month since the beginning of the year. Our members are hard-working men and women who are raising their families. In these tough economic times, any delay in the salary causes an immediate crisis for them," she said. "It cannot be right that the councillors of the CoJ get their salaries on time, but other employees of the city, whose taxes contribute to the salaries of the very same councillors, must beg to be paid. This is something which must be urgently rectified and we demand guarantees from the city, in writing, that this will never happen again," she said.