Glenda Daniels Interminable talks on civil service retrenchments are back to where they were a year ago, as government and unions prepare to renegotiate restructuring guidelines agreed at last year’s public service job summit. The 12 unions and the government, which employs more than a million people, failed to meet a December 12 deadline last year for a fully-fledged restructuring agreement when talks ended in deadlock. The key difficulty has been a lack of a common understanding over the summit deal of a year ago. Labour argues that the document does not imply retrenchments, while the government contends that it does. Talks restart this week. The aim now is to arrive at another framework deal before the end of this month. The Department of Public Service and Administration said this week that it would not comment on the issue of a new policy framework until negotiations were over. Said Khumbu Magudulela, chief negotiator in the bargaining council for the National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu): “For us restructuring means to develop, retrain and redeploy, for them it means cost-cutting through retrenchment. But we are not against retrenchments at any cost. We have consistently said that justified retrenchments will be accepted.”
Government negotiators view Nehawu as one of the most recalcitrant public service unions. Magudulela said retrenchment packages would be acceptable in the case of workers over the age of 55 who could not be retrained or transferred. The unions have complained that the government has yet to indicate where and why certain workers were redundant, and has produced no plans to retrain or redeploy. They say they all want improved service delivery and believe in the need for restructuring. “There are areas of excess personnel, but there are also areas of understaffing. You need experienced managers to move people to areas of need and to retrain staff,” Magudulela said. The government has openly stated that it wants an “educated, streamlined and mobile public service”, which labour interprets to mean that unskilled workers will be most affected by job cuts. Both parties confirmed last month that the majority of jobs will be lost in agriculture, public works and roads. In the Gauteng administration, where IT, finance and human resources functions are to be centralised, skilled people will lose jobs too. Of 3 000 workers employed in Gauteng departments, about 1 500 are expected to be made redundant, the union said. Also at risk are unskilled personnel in state hospitals, like cleaners, as services were outsourced. Labour wants “development restructuring” government retraining in other skills. Last month public service unions said their research showed that already 7 274 jobs were targeted for redundancy. The public service and administration department’s spokes-person, Thembela Kulu, denied this figure. One of the reasons for last year’s deadlock was that “incompetent and inexperienced” managers were identifying redundancies in the absence of a proper guiding framework, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union said. Three months ago Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi told Parliament that discrepancies and imbalances of personnel existed. “Daily there are reports of overworked nurses, police units that are understaffed, schools with one teacher for 60 children or welfare queues of hundreds, with just three or four officials.” Fraser-Moleketi said that while the government would increase employment in the education, correctional services, justice, health, welfare and safety sectors, “it is also true that there are areas of the civil service that are overstaffed that require fundamental restructuring”. “The critical imperative is to have a fair process and to ensure that all alternatives are exhausted before anyone is retrenched a false impression is being created that we are forcing the unions to agree to retrenchment,” she said. The government has acknowledged that modernisation of the state sector is affecting job security. The public service’s personnel expenditure review reveals that more than 50 000 people in the public service are affected by outsourcing projects. Nehawu official Moloantoa Molabo said that without a paradigm shift on both sides of the negotiating table there is unlikely to be an agreement. “For us, the outsourcing and privatisation of services, which destroy jobs, are part of the broader Gear [growth, employment and redistribution strategy] objectives.”
Fraser-Moleketi has repeatedly stressed that restructuring is about improving delivery to the people.