Labour objects to the government’s ultimatum style of negotiations and want to return to the table
Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane
A threat of retrenchments in the public service is at the heart of the dispute that has led to the acrimonious stand-off between labour and the government, unions say.
Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi blasted unions in a speech in Parliament this week for not accepting her “final ultimatum”.
But unions are adamant they will not open the door to retrenchment, which they say the government wants as a trade-off for the improved wage offer. They object to the ultimatum style of negotiation on the government’s part, and want to return to the negotiating table.
Four of the 12 public service unions, representing 36% of workers, have signed the agreement. The majority, which constitute the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and some independent unions, have refused.
They argue that they agreed on procedures for restructuring the public service at the Public Service Job Summit in January, but that the government’s current proposals renege on this agreement. The proposals, Cosatu says, would bind unions into arbitration, which it fears will open the door to retrenchments.
Cosatu president Willie Madisha speculated this week that between 50000 and 100000 public servants could be retrenched.
Low morale, lack of productivity and uncertainty in the public service stems from the government’s failure to complete a skills audit meant to determine which jobs are redundant, says Cosatu’s Neva Makgetla. Such an audit would enable concrete proposals for retrenchments to be put on the table.
Labour says that a unilateral implementation of the wage offer could be illegal because less than 50% of the unions have signed.
The public service’s largest union the 230000-member South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), last week voted overwhelmingly in favour of a strike if negotiations fail. With matric exams due to start next week, this has sent tremors through the education sector.
Minister of Education Kader Asmal told Parliament last week that “the uncertainties and anxieties which the students are facing will already have had an effect”. It would “be regrettable if the matric results were to suffer as a result”.
“Thousands of children will have to repeat the year, or else be destined to walk the streets without a matric, let alone an exemption. And this, at a time when higher education institutions have capacity to take in many more students”.
Asmal told the Mail & Guardian he has “a good relationship” with the unions and supports teachers’ right to strike. However, while “the government can withstand a strike on the basis of no-work, no-pay … students cannot. From an education point of view, education jobs are not on the line,” Asmal said.
“In any case we are more likely to be recruiting than retrenching.”
Makgetla says teachers have suffered from a lack of pay progression and of career-pathing. “With a university degree you would enter the profession at a gross salary of R7000 a month, with a diploma R6000 and could stick there for 20 years.” If vacancies for departmental heads or school principals do not occur, there is no way up, she says. “As a result we’re losing many experienced teachers in their forties.”
Makgetla acknowledges the Department of Education is addressing this problem. Asmal concedes that “teachers have been previously disadvantaged in this respect, but the agreement now on the table would allow for a pay progression system to be put in place next year”.
Tertiary institutions could be badly affected next year if Sadtu does strike. “Any disruption of the examination process would be extremely serious for [our] university,” says Professor Martin West, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
Derek Swemmer, registrar of the University of the Witwatersrand, says the university “will monitor the possible strike action closely and will make contingency plans if necessary”.
As a way of breaking the impasse, Makgetla points to the education department’s ongoing identification of shortages and excesses of teachers on a school-by-school basis. This provided concrete figures and a rationale for redeployment of teachers not retrenchment.
“The public service has not gone through a process that identifies redundancies, to see if there’s a problem [of over-employment], which was agreed at the job summit. Then we could jointly look at redeployment. [The] government has never given us evidence that the public service is bloated.”