The cash-strapped City of Tshwane is withholding the salaries of close to a third of its staff pending the completion of a vetting process aimed at removing ghost employees from its payroll.
Tshwane, like other municipalities across SA, is in a precarious financial position due to declining revenue collection as residents and businesses struggle to pay for services it renders due to the Covid-19 lockdown.
The decision to withhold salaries of more than 7,000 workers comes two weeks after Tshwane agreed to implement a benchmarking agreement signed with the SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu), and the Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union (Imatu), which would cost the city R300m.
Samwu is the largest union in the metro.
The agreement was meant to put Tshwane employees’ salaries on the same footing as those of their counterparts in the country’s seven other metros.
Under the agreement, a shift system was to be introduced for all of the municipality’s 24,000 employees. The agreement also provided for a verification process to cleanse the metro of suspected ghost workers.
Tshwane acting city manager Mmaseabata Mutlaneng told Business Day that the vetting process is not yet done. “We issued lawful instructions that they must come and verify themselves, but they didn’t take us seriously,” she said, adding that the city is only freezing salaries until every employee is verified, “because it has come to our attention that there are ghost employees in the city”.
The metro will be running daily salary payments from Wednesday to make sure “everyone is paid by the end of the month”.
The city’s administrator Mpho Nawa told Business Day on Tuesday that as part of the verification process, employees have to physically go to the municipality to have their fingerprints taken and checked against the metro’s system; provide their IDs and employment contracts; prove which departments they work in; and that they are in the main staff database.
Genuine workers
“There are about 7,000 employees who did not come forward to verify their status, so they won’t get their salaries on Wednesday. This will save us approximately R200m. This city has been heavily abused for a long time, it’s on us to set it free from abuse,” said Nawa, who was appointed by the Gauteng provincial government to run the city following the political infighting that led to the collapse of the DA-led coalition council in March.
The decision to freeze unverified workers’ pay has drawn the ire of organised labour in the metro.
Mpho Tladinyane, the Tshwane regional Samwu secretary, said that while his union supports rooting out ghost members, some genuine workers could be negatively affected in the process, such as those who could not attend the verification process because they were on leave, in quarantine, or in mourning.
“Legitimate workers cannot have their salaries withdrawn as a result of the city’s failure to put in place checks and balances to prevent illegitimate individuals on their payroll,” said Tladinyane. “We therefore demand immediate payment of all salaries until such time that the city has verified the status of all employees.”
Imatu Tshwane regional manager Rudy de Bruyn said the union has engaged with attorneys and would apply for a court order if the situation persists. “They are free to embark on a verification process but they can’t stop salaries. It’s illegal. We will apply for a court order to force them to pay.”
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