Pretoria - The City of Tshwane has approached the Labour Court in a bid to overturn the verdict of the SA Local Government Bargaining Council that former general workers must be permanently employed.
The City’s application to challenge the Bargaining Council ruling would effectively block at least 88 general employees from returning to work tomorrow.
On February 28, the Council ruled in the favour of workers, who cried foul that they were unfairly dismissed.
The municipality, on the other hand, said the general workers were employed on fixed contracts for a year until the expiry of their term in 2020.
City spokesperson Selby Bokaba said: “Tshwane strenuously disagreed with the ruling, and decided to take the Bargaining Council’s ruling to a higher court – the Labour Court – as we strongly believe that it will deliver a favourable judgment to the City. Based on the review process we have embarked upon, the former contract workers cannot return to work until the Labour Court has fully ventilated the matter.”
On Friday, workers appeared to be unfazed by the City's legal challenge, saying they were looking forward to reporting for duty on March 15 in line with the Bargaining Council’s ruling.
The Council ordered the City to employ them permanently, and to pay each of them arrear salaries of R115 000 “they would have earned for the duration of employment, had it not been for unfair dismissal”.
Bargaining Council commissioner, Joseph Mphaphuli, found the applicants were employed as general workers and that there was “no end to cleaning the City”.
“The job will always be there and for that reason there will be no justification for employing cleaners on contract for a limited duration,” Mphaphuli said in his ruling.
Workers’ representative Mzuvele Cele, on Friday said: “We will report for duty on March 15, and we will see how they react.”
Cele said workers won’t take the City’s word to stay away from duty until they have been ordered otherwise by the court.
Bokaba said the City has begun a process to review the Bargaining Council’s ruling to reinstate “the so-called ‘capacity workers’ at the Labour Court in Johannesburg”.
According to him, the City believed that a different court would most likely arrive at a different outcome.
Bokaba said: “Tshwane employed 627 workers to assist with waste management on a fixed 12-months contract from November 2019 until October 31, 2020. Upon expiry of their contract, 88 of those workers demanded to be permanently absorbed as City employees.”
He said when the City insisted that they could not be absorbed into the organisational structure as their contracts had expired, they took the matter to the Bargaining Council on the grounds of unfair dismissal.
During the Council’s virtual hearing the City’s divisional head of human capital, Victor Letshiti, pointed out that the applicants were served notices of termination of employment at the expiration of their fixed term employment contract.
Pretoria News