title: “South Africa’s Tanners Left in Limbo as Wage Talks Stall Again” seo_description: “South Africa’s tanning sector remains the only industry under the NBCLI yet to conclude wage talks, leaving workers and tanners in costly uncertainty.” seo_tags: [“South Africa tanning”, “NBCLI”, “leather wages”, “tanning industry”, “labour negotiations”, “South African leather”] seo_slug: “south-africa-tanning-wage-negotiations” original_url: “https://internationalleathermaker.com/south-african-tanning-wage-negotiations-remain-unresolved/”

South Africa’s Tanners Left in Limbo as Wage Talks Stall Again

South Africa’s tanning industry has become the odd one out. While the country’s broader leather sector has been hammering out this year’s wage settlements, tanning remains the only one of the three industries under the National Bargaining Council of the Leather Industry (NBCLI) that has yet to conclude its negotiations — leaving workers and employers in a state of costly uncertainty.

The NBCLI governs three distinct segments of the leather value chain, and two of them have already reached agreement for the year. Tanning’s failure to follow suit is more than an administrative footnote. Wage negotiations are the mechanism by which stability is purchased in a sector that is capital-intensive, export-dependent, and acutely sensitive to input costs. When those talks drag, the ripple effects are felt far beyond the payroll: production planning hesitates, investment decisions are deferred, and the ever-present risk of industrial action looms larger.

Why tanning, specifically, should be the holdout is telling. South Africa’s tanneries occupy a peculiar position in the global leather map. The country processes a meaningful share of locally produced hides and exports significant volumes of wet-blue and crust leather, much of it feeding manufacturing hubs in the Far East. That business model makes margins thin and dependent on factors — hide availability, energy costs, exchange rates, and buyer demand in distant markets — that South African tanners control only at the margins. In such an environment, the gap between what labour seeks and what employers can sustain is narrow and fraught.

The unresolved talks also arrive at a delicate moment for the domestic industry. South African leather has spent years trying to move up the value chain, building finishing and manufacturing capacity rather than simply shipping semi-processed hides abroad. That ambition requires a stable, skilled workforce and predictable cost structures — precisely the conditions that stalled negotiations undermine. Every month without a settlement is a month in which the sector’s longer-term repositioning is, at best, paused.

There is a human dimension that the bare facts obscure. Tanning is physically demanding, environmentally regulated work that depends on experienced hands. Workers who have invested years acquiring the craft have a legitimate claim to wages that reflect both inflation and the value they create. Employers, for their part, are navigating an economy where energy insecurity and logistics bottlenecks already inflate the cost of doing business. Finding the landing zone between those realities is the council’s job — and, for now, its unfinished one.

What happens next is the question. Bargaining councils in South Africa have well-worn tools for breaking impasses, including mediation and, ultimately, the intervention of the relevant statutory bodies. But tools are only as effective as the willingness of both sides to use them in good faith. The longer tanning lags its peers within the NBCLI, the more it signals a deeper misalignment — one that no single wage round may fully resolve.

For an industry that wants to be taken seriously as a value-adding manufacturer rather than a raw-material exporter, resolving this standoff is not optional. The other two sectors have shown it can be done. Tanning’s turn is overdue.

Source: International Leather Maker (July 22, 2026)