South Africa’s power sector has crumbled over the last year as Eskom has slowly degenerated into a power sharing agency, forcing many into perpetual darkness and plunging companies into a period of slower growth. The country’s telecom sector may be next in line to pull a similar stunt as Go-slows at Telkom’s call centres worsened over the weekend, South Africa’s fixed line operator said on Monday.

It alleged that staff members were threatened and workers forced to leave their work stations. This comes shortly after Telkom said it will go ahead with what it described as an “automatic transfer of staff” from various divisions, including its call centres, its supply chain area and IT environments, to new employers on 31 March this year, according to TechCentral.

“Our service levels have been under severe pressure for a number of weeks,” TechCentral quoted Telkom spokesperson, Jacqui O’Sullivan, as having said.

“We would like to apologise to all our customers for the poor service levels. We have brought additional staff into our already outsourced call centres and have increased our resourcing of the non-call centre customer options,” O’Sullivan added.

Telkom’s talks with the unions regarding the section 197 outsourcing process have been on-going for a little over a month now.

Unions, the South African Communications Union (Sacu) and Solidarity recently called on Telkom to embark on voluntary severance and early retirement for workers hit by the company’s outsourcing strategies.

The unions have also called on the fix line monopoly to move the transfer date out from 31 March to 30 April. Telkom claims to have agreed to these requests.