Municipal workers would oppose the City of Johannesburg’s attempt to interdict them from embarking on a strike on Monday, a union said on Friday.
The South African Municipal Worker’s Union (Samwu), which represents over 10 000 municipal workers, planned to strike on Monday over wages, transport, performance management systems and permanent contracts for workers.
The Labour Court was expected to rule on the interdict at 2pm on Friday.
Samwu’s Johannesburg branch secretary Dumisani Langa said the union had received papers from the city on Thursday morning notifying them that city bosses had filed an urgent application on Wednesday night for an interdict to prevent the strike.
He said the union had then drawn up a replying affidavit to oppose the interdict.
”The employer claims that the strike should be stopped because Samwu has never negotiated with them on some of the issues. Yet we have been negotiating with them for more than five years.”
Langa was ”more than confident” that the judge would rule in the union’s favour.
He said members planned to strike over salary disparities throughout the pay grades.
”The city introduced a system of three different salary levels for every grade, without consulting Samwu. As a result, many long-serving workers are earning less than newly appointed workers.”
He said bosses used their discretion as to what salaries workers were appointed on and this appeared to be linked to nepotism.
The union was also demanding the re-instatement of yearly notch increases and transport for workers to-and-from work on municipal buses.
Langa said this had been terminated without consultation, which had caused ”great hardship” to workers.
He said the union was also demanding that performance management systems should be applicable only to workers reporting directly to the City and not for ordinary workers.
”If ordinary workers do not perform, the bosses must use schedule eight of the Labour Relations Act to deal with them.
”Samwu is against a potential situation where the bosses decide to privatise a service and then suddenly dismiss all the workers performing that service, claiming they are not performing adequately,” he said.
Langa also said that fixed-term contracts should be for director level posts only.
He said call-centre employees, who were currently on two-year contracts, should be given permanent contracts because their positions were permanent.
Langa also said that there needed to be a complete end to casualisation, which only benefited labour brokers.
”In the Pikitup waste management service there are 2 000 ‘subcontractors’ or badly paid workers with no benefits. Samwu demands that the city insist that the entities employ only permanent workers,” he said.
A city spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. ‒ Sapa