There will be no retrenchment of excess public service staff before June next year, Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said on Monday.
This was decided at the recent Cabinet lekgotla or planning session, she told reporters in Pretoria.
Current figures showed the public service had about 24 000 more employees than it needed, and 15 000 vacancies.
The minister said 80% of the vacancies were at skilled levels, especially in the health sector, while 70% of those in excess were workers at lower levels. To help such employees find other jobs in the public service, posts at levels one to four would continue to be advertised internally until the end of September.
Those who could not be redeployed would be placed in a special programme and retained for another nine months until June.
”These employees will be assessed and retrained and, where possible, absorbed into posts that become vacant in the nine-month period,” Fraser-Moleketi said.
”Only at the end of this period will employees who have not been redeployed be retrenched.”
Fraser-Moleketi would not give an estimate of the number of employees expected to be retrenched.
The restructuring of the public service was not about cutting numbers, she said.
”It’s about having a structure and the numbers required that will ensure effective delivery of services. We don’t want a cheap and unskilled public service.”
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said it was disturbed to hear that government still saw 24 000 public servants as ”in excess.”
In a media statement, Cosatu representative Patrick Craven said this ”flies in the face of the commitment, at the Growth and Development Summit, to maximise employment creation.”
Cosatu objected to the proposal to keep workers until June 2004, rather than finalising their appointments in the next few months.
”That only adds to uncertainty and distress,” the statement read.
While ”restructuring has had many positive aspects,” Cosatu said it had heard from its affiliates that many departments were not complying with the agreement on restructuring by ”consulting with workers, ensuring training opportunities and genuinely seeking to create jobs and redeploy workers to more effective functions.”
”The restructuring process still has two months to go. We hope that the weaknesses in the process will be corrected as soon as possible, in a spirit of ensuring good morale and stability in the public service as well as enhancing service to the public,” Cosatu said.
Cabinet also approved the setting up of a corps of community development workers.
Fraser-Moleketi described these as an additional type of public servant, filling the gap between government services and communities.
”This will be a public servant who is able to assist citizens with matters such as birth certificates, ID and social grant applications and small business start-ups in their own communities.”
Many people, especially in rural areas, were unaware of the services to which they were entitled or did not know how to make use of them.
”The community workers will be living in communities, speaking the language of those communities, in many instances even be graduates.”
Fraser-Moleketi said the recruitment and training of community workers would begin in Gauteng, North West, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.
”We are talking about a few thousand people, and are looking at the remuneration they will receive.”
The first group would be trained and ready to start work by September or October.
Fraser-Moleketi said the idea was not to replace public servants with community workers.
”It is about putting in place a facilitator who will be able… to mediate the kind of service delivery required,” she said. – Sapa