The Public Servants Association (PSA) is demanding an above-inflation wage increase of 12.5% for its more than 235,000 members, saying hard-pressed public servants had not received any real increases over the past four years.
In a statement seen by Business Day on Sunday, the PSA said the employer proposed a draft salary offer for 2023/2024 during a special Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC) meeting on Friday.
The proposal is for a 4.7% pay hike on a sliding scale in year one, with increases in line with the consumer price index in the second and third years.
A coalition of disgruntled public service unions, including the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union; the SA Policing Union; the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union; and the Democratic Nursing Organisation of SA, said on Thursday they would not participate in the PSCBC process.
They want the 2022/2023 wage impasse resolved first before entering into the talks on pay for 2023/2024.
They are still angry after Thulas Nxesi, the acting minister of public service & administration, unilaterally implemented a 3% pay hike for the country’s 1.3-million public servants in 2022. Three teachers’ unions — Sadtu, Naptosa and Satu — broke ranks and accepted the 3% increase.
The government has said the increase, which includes an extension of the R1,000 after-tax cash gratuity, is in line with its commitment to rein in the public sector wage bill, which accounts for more than one-third of government spending.
The unions were demanding a 10% increase, citing the rapidly rising cost of living. SA’s inflation rate eased to 6.9% in January from 7.2% in December 2022.
The disgruntled unions said they would serve the government with a seven-day strike notice on February 22 in support of their demands for higher wages for 2022/2023.
On Friday, PSA assistant GM Reuben Maleka told Business Day: “We must negotiate for the 2023/2024 financial year because we are in a state where our members have not received any real increase, so we won’t stand outside the ring. We must be part of this process because if we don’t, it’s our members that will suffer. We need to improve their conditions.”
He said the PSA would continue to engage with other public sector unions.
“Failure to commence with wage negotiations urgently will severely disadvantage public servants who are increasingly cash-strapped and indebted. Public servants have not recovered from the events of 2020 where the government robbed them of a salary increase. The future of the current R1,000 cash gratuity is at risk, taking into account that the employer plans to terminate this payment by March 31 2023.
“The PSA cannot afford to see the R1,000 cash gratuity being taken away without any sort of replacement and recklessly further plunge members into continued, old strike action that will further deepen their financial woes owing to the no-work, no-pay principle,” Maleka said.
The PSA embarked on a one-day national strike in November 2022 and subsequently joined other public service unions in their march to the National Treasury in the same month.
Nxesi said the government was committed to aligning wage negotiations to the budgeting cycle of the government and to working with unions to stabilise the public service.
“It is important that the PSCBC processes and systems are capacitated and consolidated further, rather than being abandoned,” the acting minister said, calling on unions that have resolved to withdraw their participation from the PSCBC to reconsider and return to the negotiating table.
“This will ensure that their members’ views are heard, and their interests are catered for in salary negotiations and in their conditions of service, benefits, and wellbeing in the workplace,” Nxesi said.
Maleka said the PSA is awaiting the upcoming budget speech by finance minister Enoch Godongwana on Wednesday as a “first major test for restoring damaged trust between unions and government”.
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