Students at Wits University are protesting to express their dissatisfaction with university management.
The workers decided in a meeting on Friday to escalate a concerted industrial campaign to protect their jobs. This follows University of Witwatersrand management's failure to guarantee them that incoming contractor companies will retain all outsourced cleaning staff.
Contracts of companies currently employing them are lapsing at the end of June, and so are job contracts.
Responding to workers' demands on Thursday, Wits's management said the university was not responsible for their job security. "Since service providers are currently contracted on an outsourced basis, the university is not their direct employer," said Tawana Kupe, deputy vice-chancellor for finance, in a letter to workers.
The letter did not guarantee that Wits expected incoming companies to retain all workers, protestors said. But it confirmed their fears that the appointed companies will interview them for the positions they already occupy.
Said Kupe in the letter: "The new service providers are willing to appoint employees of existing cleaning contractors based on an open and fair appointment process with legitimate selection criteria. Since this is a negotiated process, the university can't guarantee retention of jobs by all employees of existing cleaning service providers. Our position is that the new service providers should employee as many of the current employees as possible."
Following a demonstration this week against the university's plans to re-interview certain staff for the positions they already fill, the workers will picket inside the concourse of the Senate House in the East campus next Wednesday. Next week's demonstration is planned to take place at the same time the university's senate holds its meeting in the venue.
'Workers must retain their jobs'
The aim is to convince the highest academic decision-making body of the university to intervene. "We want senate to make it clear to management that workers must retain their jobs automatically. No one should be interviewed," Mathew Bodiba, a landscaper at the university, told the Mail & Guardian.
Wits spokesperson Shirona Patel said two companies had been awarded the tenders. "But contracts [are] still under negotiation," she added.
Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, a PhD student and member of the Wits workers' solidarity committee, told workers at the meeting that management had effectively confirmed no jobs would be guaranteed. "It means you are going to queue up again for your jobs. Maybe those companies are coming with their own people, we don't know," he said.
"This is why we must fight. Not even one person must lose their job. If senate can't stop management we'll have to [wage] a political struggle," Ndlozi said.
Rumours about how jobs might be lost went into overdrive amongst the workers. A cleaner told the Friday meeting she had learned from one manager that the company rumoured to take over cleaning services, plans to fire everyone over 50 years of age. In addition, the company aims to keep just 50% of current cleaners.
Emotions were running high amongst the workers. "How can you work for 15 years in the same job and suddenly you're told you are to be interviewed for the same job? It's clear that they want to fire some of us," said Bodiba.
Privatised jobs
Wits University introduced outsourcing in 2000. Then vice-chancellor Colin Bundy privatised cleaning, catering and grounds maintenance. Hundreds of Wits workers were retrenched but about 250 were re-employed by private companies.
The process unfolding now is reminiscent of that time, said the workers solidarity committee in pamphlets it distributed in campus this week. "This is a painful reminder of a shameful episode in this university's history when, following the decision to outsource, workers who were employed by Wits had to queue to get their jobs back. That this is happening again on our campus is disgraceful."