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HOSPERSA, a trade union with more than 70 000 members registers its disdain and disgust at the disingenuous and mischievous attempts by the State as employer to mislead the public through the press release issued by the Department of Public Service and Administration.

The current years wage negotiations have reached the stage of deadlock with this union having now referred a dispute to the Public Sector Co-ordinating Bargaining Council on 5 October 2022.

“The employer claims in its press release that it is, in effect, offering public servants an effective increase of nine percent; that is blatant disinformation”, said Hospersa General Secretary Waheed Hoosen.  The employer calculates this by submitting that employees will receive a non-pensionable cash allowance each month which on average equates to 4.5 percent and an across-the-board increase of 3 percent.  In addition, it says, employees will also be paid pay progression of 1.5 percent.  

The truth of the matter is that public servants have been receiving the gratuity for well over a year now and its value has become entrenched in their pay-packets.  The pay progression has always been a part of their conditions of service.  It is not something new.  Had the employer’s final offer of 3 percent across the board been accepted, workers would not have seen an increase of 9 percent in their salaries the following month after agreement – but only three percent.

What is particularly galling is that when the employer was offering a zero percent increase at the commencement of negotiations, all the while pleading poverty, government had granted its office bearers in parliament a 3 percent increase, backdated to 2021!  Yet it is these very people who are trying to freeze the salaries of public servants and increasing the workload by not filling critical posts in the public service.   

“Public Servants are being sacrificed at the altar of government incompetence by being made the scapegoats of promises made by the State to the IMF to secure a massive loan”, said Hoosen.  The employer came into the negotiations from the start with unclean hands, knowing that appeasing their political masters was their end game, not the welfare and benefits of their employees.

HOSPERSA is a major union organizing in the health sector.  No consideration was given to the fact that health workers were in the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic, many paying the ultimate sacrifice, yet they are rewarded with no salary increase for the last two years.  It must also be remembered that government reneged on a three-year salary deal by breaching the agreement and refusing to implement the last year’s increase as agreed.

“HOSPERSA accepts that there is pressure on the national fiscus”, said Hoosen.  It is not so much the 3 percent across the board that the union finds unpalatable, but the employer’s conditions it placed during the negotiations that the increase would have to be funded from the existing human resources budget, meaning public servants would lose other benefits to secure an extra percent, leaving them no better off.  Part of these conditions included the ability of the employer to initiate retrenchments of certain sectors of the public service.  No trade union can ever agree to having its members retrenched.

“Government in this regard glibly glossed over the issue of sourcing the increases by failing to accept that there are indeed other sources of funds”, said Hoosen.  Why are they not looking at tightening up on dodgy procurement processes where the State for example pays over fifty rand for a roll of toilet paper – or show some political will to address the scourge of corruption.  Properly managed, this has the potential to inject billions into the State coffers – yet government seemingly only has the ability to go for the low hanging fruits of its own employee’s remuneration.

Adding insult to the injuries inflicted by this employer, is that it readily acceded to the demands of a bunch of thugs at Eskom – also of governments own entities - whose illegal strike has contributed to keeping us all in the dark by giving them seven percent!  Yet those who have respected the rule of law and negotiated lawfully and with good faith, have been snubbed.

Governments actions are a full-scale assault on collective bargaining.

Issued by HOSPERSA