The South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) and Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union (Imatu) look set to issue the municipality with a 48-hour notice to strike after their demand for a R30 000 long-service, back-pay bonus for more than 2 000 workers was shut down on Friday.
In a meeting with corporate services portfolio head Annette Lovemore, Samwu and Imatu members demanded that 2 689 municipal workers should each be paid a R30 000 settlement.
Samwu regional secretary Mqondisi Nodongwe said the demand stemmed from money owed to these workers after the former Uitenhage, Despatch and Port Elizabeth municipalities merged to form Nelson Mandela Bay in 2000.
“In July 2016, we entered into an agreement with the employer that we should look at the erstwhile municipalities’ long-service bonus and it turned out that Uitenhage had the best one.
“We agreed long-service bonuses should be migrated to the Uitenhage plan and that benefit should have been harmonised then, whereas the municipality only implemented it in 2016.”
Nodongwe said each worker who was entitled to the back pay should be paid the R30 000 in a flat once-off payment.
“This is a compromise position we’re taking here because should we count the actual number of years in monetary terms, these people would at least be getting in the region of R200 000 per person, but we’ve given the employer our settlement proposal,” he said.
The municipality had not agreed to the demands and, to show how serious they were, they would be striking.“The R36-million total offered falls short of what we want . . . so we’ll issue the municipality with a 48-hour notice to strike and on Thursday we’ll be there in the street,” Nodongwe said.
Lovemore said that, over the years, the municipality had made efforts to ensure there was parity as employees were on different schemes depending on which municipality they had worked for prior to the merger.
“This has taken quite a long time and this is not our competency, it is the competency of the national bargaining council and the long-service bonus is an issue of their Eastern Cape division which they finalised,” she said.
The municipality was phasing in the long-service bonus so that by the end of the next financial year everyone would be on the same long-service scheme.
But the unions were demanding full back pay amounting to about R75-million, which the municipality could not afford.
“So we’re trying to say to the unions, we hear you, we understand your point, but we have to work within our level of affordability.”
Lovemore said the savings the workers were talking about was money available to fill vacancies which would not have been used by the end of the financial year.
“At this stage, a realistic estimate is about R30-million to R36-million and that’s what we’re offering,” she said.