Johannesburg — IT WAS relief all round yesterday when thousands of striking construction workers returned to work only a week after they downed tools at various strategic infrastructure projects around the country, including stadiums, the Gautrain, roads and airports.

The strike made headlines around the world due to persistent concerns over whether SA will be ready to host next year's World Cup, the first to be held in Africa.

Workers were able to take a hard line from the start because they knew the consequences of missing infrastructure completion deadlines were too ghastly for the country to contemplate.

Pressure on employers from the government and Fifa was at least partly responsible for the speedy settlement and the size of the wage deal, which at 12% is well above average and precisely double the upper end of the Reserve Bank's inflation target.

Other conditions agreed to by the employers to end the strike included the extension of social benefits such as medical aid and pensions to all permanent employees. Significantly, there is nothing in the agreement preventing workers from downing tools again before the World Cup should another dispute arise, despite the employers' attempts to secure such a guarantee.

The finer details of the final agreement signed this week are not public, and questions remain over who exactly will pick the tab for the additional costs that will clearly have to be worked into already stretched project budgets.

Many of the World Cup-related infrastructure contracts included cost-escalation clauses that ultimately mean the client -- ultimately the taxpayer -- will carry the can. That may also explain the quick employer capitulation. It is easier to be magnanimous when the taxpayer is footing much of the bill.

That said, some of the contracts in question were fixed, which means the construction and engineering consortiums concerned will take a knock to the bottom line. And since the competition authorities said recently that they are investigating a number of these companies for colluding to push up the costs of World Cup projects, shareholders should be as alarmed by the size of the settlement as taxpayers.