Make the striking workers at pallet making giant, Chep South Africa, permanent now!

To the management of Chep South Africa and Brambles Australia (owners of Chep),

We the undersigned, hereby call on you to accede to the demands of the 170 workers who have been on strike at the Chep Jet Park warehouse in Gauteng since 21 August 2025.

The workers do backbreaking work yet earn rates of pay as low as R9000 per month. They spend a large amount of their wages on transport to get to work. What makes their situation worse is that the Labour Relations Act clearly states that workers hired by a labour broker to work for a client company become permanent employees of the client company after three months in the job.

The striking Chep workers have been working for you for up to 18 years, yet Chep still forces them to remain casual workers. Chep has illegally insisted that the labour broker, C-Force, is the client company and the workers are permanent employees of C-Force. This is absurd as the workers only ever work at Chep Jet Park and C-Force, which openly functions as a labour broker, has no work of its own to give the workers. C-Force has only ever functioned as a labour broker.

We, the undersigned, are aware that Chep South Africa is a subsidiary company of Brambles, an Australian multinational that made a profit of R24.21 billion this year. Chep South Africa can easily afford to make the 170 striking workers permanent, allocate them the benefits of other permanent workers at Chep South Africa and pay them a wage increase of R2500 across the board to bring their meagre pay closer to a living wage.

We, the undersigned are also aware, that Chep globally experiences many more strikes than other companies because of its poor labour relations. Chep does not respect unions in the normal functioning of the workplace. It instead adopts more of a 'baaskap' (apartheid-style bosses) approach to workers which undermines workers' dignity.