The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s infrastructure and engineering department is the sickest department in the metro with more than 5 000 days of sick leave taken in the first four months of the year.
Trailing that are safety and security with a whopping 3 631 days and public health with 3 218 days sick leave taken between January and April.
The report on sick leave patterns in the municipality was revealed to the human resources portfolio committee on Tuesday.
Corporate services and human resources acting executive director Nosipho Xhego said that officials had discovered that various departments were not monitoring sick leave.
Xhego said officials had also noticed a pattern of employees booking sick leave days on Mondays and Fridays.
The report was the subject of debate at a human resources portfolio meeting this week.
Absenteeism in other departments was as follows:
Budget and treasury 2 442.5 days;
Economic development and recreation 2 090.5 days;
Human resources and corporate services 1 476.7 days; andHousing and land 1 174 days. Corporate services portfolio head Annette Lovemore said the absenteeism rate at the municipality was a cause for concern.
“Our absenteeism rate is exceptionally high, it’s in the region of 7 to 8%, which is reason for great concern,” Lovemore said.
She said the aim was to have the rate of absenteeism benchmark between 1% and 2%.
The plan is to call in a service provider who will analyse the sick leave trends.
The analysis will be followed by an investigation into sick notes.
“There are instances of serial offenders and there are probably instances where people are really ill but they are taking a lot of sick leave.
“The levels of sick leave taken are high with some people taking 20, 30, and even 40 days over three months,” Lovemore said.
A report detailing the cause of the absenteeism would be tabled at the next portfolio committee meeting.
Lovemore said department heads were simply not monitoring sick leave that had been taken.
She said the rate of sick leave could be attributed to staff shortages or low staff morale.
“One of the aspects that we looked at is have we got [situations] in the municipality like heavy workloads making people take a lot of sick leave.
“The risks are service delivery-related.
“We are paying monies that come from rates and service delivery charges; two people who are not at work for 8% of the time is very high.
“We are spending money on people being at home rather than spending money on service delivery.
“We need to look at patterns – are these Friday, Monday absenteeism?
“We function on a public purse and we cannot be spending it on people who are not productive without good reason,” Lovemore said.
City manager Johann Mettler said he had been alerted to trends of absenteeism where employees were not at work on Fridays and Monday.
Mettler said the absenteeism could be attributed to exposure to bad weather and working in unhealthy conditions as well as the age of the workforce.
Mettler said there was a system in place where employees had to account for their days absent.
“If you are consistently sick then we will start asking questions.”
He said as part of consequence management, staff who were absent had to submit sick certificates to account for their absenteeism.
“If they can’t account, we inform them that they will be short paid,” Mettler said.