Durban - Ugu District Municipality will fork out millions of rand in back-pay compensation to staff members it dismissed three years ago after the workers were reinstated following an agreement between the municipality and the labour union.
A total of 119 workers in the Water Unit are going back to work on November 1 following the agreement between the SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) and the South Coast municipality.
The agreement stipulated that the workers would be paid a back-pay of 12 months and there were ongoing negotiations regarding how the issue of their pension would be settled. The agreement is set to be concluded by council on Thursday during a meeting.
While some councillors have claimed the back-pay alone could be a minimum of R34 million, the municipality and the unions decided to steer clear from attaching a figure, stating that calculations needed to be done.
The deputy secretary of Samwu in the province, Xolani Shinga, said they were looking to engage pension experts to settle the issue of the pension that was disrupted when the employees were sacked.
He said the municipality could not claim not to have the money to pay the back-pay.
“It would be a fallacy if they claimed not to have the money,” he said. “If there was no money, we would be the first to know that as workers, in all areas of that municipality we have our members.
“What we know is that after these workers were dismissed, there was no mass hiring of workers in Ugu.
“The municipality should therefore have kept the money of these workers aside until the matter was settled,” he said.
Shinga said their members had suffered harm as a result of being dismissed and had lost jobs and homes. “That is the sad part, we could have sued (the municipality for that) but this agreement was a compromise agreement,” he said, adding that the priority had been to reinstate the workers.
Opposition party councillors said reinstating the workers could have serious financial implications for the municipality.
DA caucus leader Leonard Ngcobo said they estimated that the municipality would need about R34m to pay the workers for all the time they had been sitting at home.
“That is not the final figure, the municipality will have to pay demands to pension contributions and for medical aid, furthermore some of these workers lost homes and cars after they were fired, which means they could come and claim those losses from the municipality.
“We have been working very hard to put the municipality on a strong financial footing, we have appointed a new municipal manager and new chief financial officer to make sure that the municipality is financially stable, but I fear that this decision will put the municipality back to where it was before, having no money,” Ngcobo said.
Municipal spokesperson France Zama said the municipality would pay the back-pay of 12 months.
“We are still going to calculate how much that will be as the workers are on different packages,” said Zama, adding that the municipality had not committed itself to paying for any other losses.