Municipality facing crisis of ageing staff

The Nelson Mandela Bay municipality is facing an ageing workforce crisis with no succession plan in place to replace the thousands of staff expected to retire within the next five to 15 years.

The average age of staff in the municipality is 45 years.

Out of a workforce of about 6,268 permanent staff, a sixth are between the ages of 55 and 65 and on the cusp of retirement.

The municipality, however, does not have plan to train the younger staff and retain the institutional knowledge.

The worrying reality was revealed by human resources acting director Phillip Rautenbach to the corporate services portfolio committee on Tuesday.

The report comes after a request from former committee chair Annette Lovemore, who said in July the age of the people available to work for the city was worrying.

Rautenbach said a histogram of the distribution of ages of municipal employees emphasised the need for the city to start looking at hiring younger people.

Across the various departments the youngest employee is 21 while the oldest is 65.

The municipality has only two employees between 20 and 21, 66 are between 21 and 26 and about 1,027 are in the 41-46 age bracket.

“From age 56 up until 65 you see that over 1,000 people are going to leave this organisation within the next 10 years.

“That means we have to have some plan where these skills can be transferred to the next generation,” Rautenbach said.

“We have narrowed it down and given a breakdown for various departments. Fifty-six people will be leaving over the next four years.”

He said the drawing up of a succession plan was under way and would be prominently featured in the city’s new employment equity plan.

“The question we are asking is what we are doing to ensure that these skills are passed on? This is the work in progress.”

He said a new key performance indicator for the human resources sub-departments had been established and the various sub-departments needed to get together and draw up a plan.

Corporate services acting boss Nosipho Xhego said a look into the long service bonus impasse between the municipality and many of its workers showed that while the city was not attracting young staff, those who were employed stayed on for many years.

“More than 4,000 employees have at least 10 years of service,” Xhego said.

She said the report would also look at the years of service of each employee.

“Workers who enter the municipality a bit late tend to leave a bit late; they stay for longer. But this doesn’t take away the fact that we have an ageing workforce.

“We will provide an improved report which shows the age and years of service.

“We need to ring-fence certain positions for our interns and learners that have gone through programmes within the institution.”

Lovemore said: “This is a report that I welcome. I am sorry that it had to take a request to get it here because it’s something that we should be looking at on an ongoing basis – the age analysis of our institution.

“One thing clear in the histogram is that it is skewed.

“The highest peak at the moment is 46-50.

“Young people are not joining this organisation.

“The peaks from the ages of 21-30 are low; they are even lower than the 35-50 peak.

“People are joining this organisation in their late 30s to 40s, which is a sad reflection on our organisation.

“This says that this is not an organisation of choice and that’s something we have to turn around – it ties up very much with the professionalisation of our organisation.”

DA councillor Ondela Kepe said: “We want people to be within the organisation for as long as possible in order for us to operate.

“There are a number of projects that we run under skills development which also indicate that a lot of people are dropping out of programmes and we are not absorbing some after they have gone through the programmes, which is a concern because there doesn’t seem to be any relation between the programmes we run for young people and our intake of young people.”