TRADE Union Solidarity said on Wednesday it would take Eskom to court in a bid to nullify the power utility’s current affirmative action plan.

Eskom’s current plan that would see job levels requiring specific skills was unreasonable‚ would further erode the utility’s skills base and compound the current power crisis‚ the trade union said in a statement.

Solidarity on Wednesday said that until 2020 Eskom planned to reduce the number of employees with the exception of black and coloured women with the “intention ... to achieve a workforce directly reflecting the racial composition of the economically active population and numerical goals were not based on the needs of the organisation and or the availability of skills‚ but were determined by way of a mathematical calculation“.

Skills and experience at the utility were not easily replaced and “Eskom is therefore sacrificing essential skills in order to achieve its ideology of national racial representativeness. It is a lose-lose situation‚” said Solidarity deputy general-secretary Johan Kruger in the statement.

In a separate statement on Wednesday‚ Solidarity also called for the Department of Energy to allow private individuals to generate and sell power to the grid. Solidarity‚ in conjunction with “do-it-yourself” exhibition KragDag‚ called for regulatory exemptions for private power generation.