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The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) fully supports its affiliated union, the South African Municipal Workers Union's march to the offices of the Gauteng Premier and those of the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) tomorrow, 11 May 2023.

The National Leaders of the Federation will join SAMWU in support of workers’ reasonable and sensible demands. The union will be submitting a memorandum of demands pushing both SALGA and the government to deal with the myriad of pertinent issues affecting workers and service delivery across local government.

The first issue affecting workers is a cost-of-living crisis that has been made worse by the government’s ongoing austerity measures that have greatly affected municipal workers. The current economic trends have unleashed very harsh conditions for the working class.

We support the call for the elimination of the low wage regime at the local government level, including the failure of the government to pay the Expanded Public and Community Works Programmes’ participants a National Minimum Wage.

The Federation supports the union’s demand for an urgent amendment of the unconstitutional Municipal Systems Amendment Act of 2022 that has introduced a new blanket ban on all 350 000 municipal employees from holding office at any level in a political party. 

The original draft of the Bill was only meant to apply this limitation of political association to municipal managers and the senior managers reporting directly to them before SALGA sneakily convinced an unsuspecting Parliament to extend it to include all municipal employees. 

This blanket prohibition is unconstitutional and violates the rights of all municipal employees. Thousands of municipal employees are now receiving letters from their managers warning them that unless they stand down from whichever position they may hold in their political party, they will be dismissed from their jobs.

The union will also be raising sharply the failure of the government to come out with a turnaround strategy to revive about 90% of municipalities  experiencing financial distress. Local government is in real trouble with many rural municipalities no longer able to provide basic services and up to twenty-seven (27) municipalities in the Northern and Eastern Cape, North-West, and Free State, and more recently also Limpopo and Gauteng, are routinely failing to pay their employees. The Federation fully supports the call by SAMWU for Treasury, COGTA and SALGA to intervene urgently.  A new funding model is needed to halt the rapid slide and collapse of local government.  The deterioration in basic services is causing many companies to close and send their employees to the unemployment queue.  We cannot afford to create rural economic wastelands.

We also join SAMWU in lamenting the chaotic state of political coalitions at a local government level that has created instability and undermined service delivery.  While these coalition agreements are perfectly permissible, it’s deeply worrying that many of them have been used for narrow political interests. This has greatly undermined accountability and created instability that has compromised service delivery.

Workers demand that these coalition partners base their coalition agreements on rational political behaviour and commitment to service delivery.  It is untenable that some of our big and strategic municipalities are collapsing, and they cannot take a long-term view, regarding their work because of the failure of political leadership.  We call on all workers and South Africans to support this march because the issues being raised by SAMWU are not just shop floor issues, but they are societal issues.

Issued by COSATU