PRETORIA – The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) will demand a double-digit wage increase, deputy general secretary Karl Cloete said on Wednesday.

"They [the demands] are developed against the backdrop of high cost of living and the heavy socio-economic burden imposed on our members."

He was speaking on the last day of Numsa's bargaining conference in Pretoria.

"We are emerging from our national bargaining conference more confident, united, better prepared and well equipped to represent our members as demanded by our theme -- decent work and living wage now."

He said the figures would be disclosed once union members had been informed.

"We are not going to disclose the figure. The media will splash them all over..."

He said the national bargaining conference was a collective product of intense and vigorous work done at the shop floor in January.

"As results of their meagre wages our members, like other workers, support the vast army of the unemployed who are languishing in squalor and abject poverty, mainly black, especially African, working class townships and informal settlements."

Cloete said the 1994 negotiated settlement offered some benefits to the black majority but, in the main it has been white monopoly capital who became the main beneficiary of the 1994 democratic breakthrough.

"The current state of South African working class tells us a story which is too horrific to be good."

The union said it wanted to close the apartheid wage gap, fight for equity and demand a living wage.

Numsa would demand a double-digit increase inclusive of CPI (consumer price index) over a year. It would also demand paid time off for shop stewards and free solar geysers for Eskom employees.

Cloete said wage negotiations should benefit all members.

The union would also demand shift allowance, service allowance, housing allowance, transport allowance and tool allowance.

Union president Andrew Chirwa said wage demands would be handed to the employer next week and negotiations were expected to start in April.

Chirwa said the union would conduct a protected strike on March 19, to demand jobs for youth.

"This is the first of a series of rolling socio-economic strikes that the union decided on at its special national congress in December 2013."