BY IRWIN ANGIKI
The Workers Union of the Solomon Islands (WUSI) and Solomon Islands Ports Authority (SIPA) have been given another two weeks to negotiate their disputes.
The Trade Dispute Panel (TDP) has directed both parties to negotiate and come up with a collective agreement within 14 days starting yesterday. WUSI is representing SIPA workers.
WUSI Secretary General Adrian Tuhanuku said WUSI is hoping to sign the collective agreement to be presented to the SIPA Board when the board meets on April 28.
SIPA could not comment when sought yesterday.
The dispute between SIPA and WUSI culminated in a strike on Thursday last week (April 9).
The strike lasted 16 hours, beginning 12 midnight, ending at 4pm, and reportedly costing SIPA millions in losses.
WUSI called off the strike after SIPA referred the matter to the TDP. WUSI later made a counter referral that day.
Mr Tuhanuku said WUSI and the SIPA workers committee are scrutinising the response from SIPA to make their counter response.
The collective agreement has three parts. Part 1, called Appendix 1, is the recognition part – in which SIPA had to officially recognise WUSI as representing its workers. Appendix 2 is the workers’ working conditions. Appendix 3 is the wages, incentives and entitlements.
The contentious part is Appendix 3, Tuhanuku said.
Connected to wages and incentives are (1) the normal ‘increment’ and (2) the Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) – which SIPA has claimed it has met for the workers.
However, WUSI doubts this arguing that it was not present when SIPA implemented the increment and COLA.
“SIPA had said that it had complied with everything that we had demanded for the workers. What we had argued for fall into two categories, increment and COLA,” Tuhanuku said.
“In a normal collective agreement, we should be present during the increment in which we will input the interest of the workers. But, since we were not present, we relied on the reports from the SIPA Human Resources based on their own internal processes since 2018.
“The other one is COLA. We had asked for 5 percent across the board since 2018. SIPA claimed it had complied. So, we asked to see the percentage of the COLA they had given to the workers.
“Discussions yesterday [Monday, April 13] we agreed that if SIPA has done as it claims, then we want to know how many percentage is for increment and how many percentage is for COLA.”
Other discussions focused on entitlements and privileges, which include education and holiday and other entitlements, Tuhanuku said.
“The timeline given by TDP is we will meet on Friday with SIPA, then next week either Tuesday or Wednesday, then finally on Friday to hopefully sign the collective agreement.
“We have 14 days to negotiate and sign the collective agreement before TDP calls us back to the table,” Tuhanuku said.
Background
The issue between SIPA and WUSI, representing SIPA workers goes back to 2018, and runs through terms of three chief executive officers (CEO) of SIPA.
SIPA since 2018 refused to recognise WUSI as representative of SIPA workers. However, the current CEO was forced to recognise WUSI after a secret ballot on March 17, 2025 saw 374 out of 383 workers choosing union representation by WUSI. SIPA has 499 permanent workers.
Negotiations between SIPA and WUSI proceeded, but then broke down when SIPA demanded that the log of claims be back-dated to 2024. WUSI refused to budge and argued that the log of claims should be back-dated to 2018.
Failure to reach a compromise led to WUSI issuing the 28-day strike notice on February 25, 2026.
Further negotiations could not come up with resolutions and a 14-day extension was given, starting March 24.
The extension lapsed on April 8 with no resolution and the strike took effect April 9.
Log of claims
SIPA in its statement on April 9 said the log of claims covered wage increase, allowance adjustments, bonuses and covid-allowances.
“We also wish to clarify recent media reports regarding the grounds for the strike. The strike action was centred on matters relating to wage increases for the period 2018–2025, allowance adjustments, bonuses, and COVID-19 related payments. Solomon Ports confirms that no other matters formed part of the official log of claims submitted by the Workers Union of Solomon Islands (WUSI), contrary to suggestions made in recent media articles,” SIPA said.
However, according to the WUSI February 25 strike notice, the workers’ claims included few more items:
– Deliberate Avoidance and Delay of Settling negotiations on Terms & Conditions of Service of the Employees of SIPA.
– Preferential Award of Benefits to employees (eg. Education funds, Special advances, School fees, Bonus payment, Acting Allowance, etc)
– Salary structure not reviewed since 2018
– Preferential appraisal
– Unfair and preferential disciplinary
– Sexual harassment
– Nepotism – current employment recruitment
– Covid allowance
Photo: Tony Iroga
For feedback, contact: [email protected]
Editor: [email protected]
