Labour federation Cosatu has welcomed a ruling by the labour court which found the prohibition of all municipal employees from holding political office to be unconstitutional.
The ruling comes after the SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) successfully approached the Constitutional Court on the constitutional invalidity of the Municipal Systems Amendment Act, which introduced a new blanket ban on all municipal employees from holding office at any level in a political party.
They argued that the Municipal Systems Amendment Act, signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2022, is in contravention of clauses in the bill of rights which state that every citizen is free to make political choices, including the right to participate in the activities of, or recruit members for, a political party, and to campaign for a political party or cause.
Samwu, the largest trade union in the local government sector representing more than 160,000 of SA’s estimated 350,000 municipal workers, is an affiliate of labour federation Cosatu and a key ally of the ANC. The governing party has always relied on its alliance partners for election support.
In a statement on Friday, Cosatu said: “The labour court has found the prohibition of all municipal employees from holding office in a political party to be unconstitutional and has awarded costs against government. This judgment is backdated to November 2022. Instructions by municipalities to employees to resign from any political office-bearer positions they may hold or be dismissed, have been declared invalid.”
Cosatu said the original draft of the amendment act agreed to by the ANC-led tripartite alliance and government, and which was tabled in parliament, provided for a rational and limited restriction on the rights of political association to municipal managers and the senior managers reporting directly to them.
However, these provisions were “quietly and clumsily amended by parliament on the instigation of the SA Local Government Association (Salga) and extended to include all 350,000 municipal employees”.
“This took it from being a narrow limitation of the rights of a few, to the blanket prohibition of constitutional rights of all municipal employees.”
Cosatu said the original limitation of rights of municipal managers was based on the belief that when such managers held office in a political party they could undermine or overrule the mayors and mayoral committees they account to.
Extending this to include municipal security guards, cleaners, electricians and refuse collectors was “ludicrous and a shocking attack on workers’ constitutional rights”.
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