Trade union federations say they want finance minister Tito Mboweni to tell the country during his medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS) that he will honour an agreement to increase pay for public servants.
The unions have been on a collision course with the government since it backed out of a pay-hike deal after Mboweni’s huge budget cuts to contain rising government debt and a ballooning budget deficit.
Implementing the last leg of the wage agreement — signed in the public sector co-ordinating bargaining council (PSCBC) in 2018 — for 1.3-million public servants — will cost the government R37.8bn. But the government cannot raise the money to pay for it. The issue is the subject of arbitration and court proceedings.
Cosatu spokesperson Sizwe Pamla said: “The government needs to cease its war against public servants. It must honour its legally binding 2018 wage agreement and move to engage labour at the PSCBC on the next three-year agreement.”
Pamla said the extension of the monthly R350 Covid-19 special relief grant by three months, though welcome, still needed to be extended beyond the three months, and should be used as the foundation for a basic income grant for the unemployed.
Extending the special grant would cost the Treasury about R6bn. Mboweni had said previously that the country could not afford to permanently pay the special allowance of R350 a month that was announced in April as part of a R500bn Covid-19 relief package.
Human rights organisation Black Sash said that while those with little or no income would benefit from the three-month extension of the R350 Covid-19 social relief grant, “the crisis of structural unemployment, affecting over 12-million people, will not be resolved by January 2021 and will continue to impact mainly women, informal workers and those living in rural areas”.
The organisation will protest outside parliament from 10am to noon before the MTBPS on Wednesday in solidarity with the “millions of people, predominantly women and children, who will suffer as a consequence of government’s continued failure to adequately prioritise human rights in the budget framework”.
Federation of Unions of SA (Fedusa) president Godfrey Selematsela said they hoped Mboweni would address the public-sector wage issue thoroughly on Wednesday.
He said Mboweni needed to focus on small, medium and micro enterprises to reignite the economy and create jobs. The economy lost 2.2-million jobs during the second quarter, according to Stats SA data.
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