This news aggregator site highlights South African labour news from a wide range of internet and print sources. Each posting has a synopsis of the source article, together with a link or reference to the original. Postings cover the range of labour related matters from industrial relations to generalist human resources.
Last Update: 08-08-2025
The Star reports that the Public Servants Association (PSA) and several Cosatu and Saftu unions have been fingered for allegedly misrepresenting their membership in the Public Health and Social Development Sectoral Bargaining Council, which allowed them to receive more money from the council.
This was revealed by an independent audit report conducted by the firm Kreston and released earlier this month.
Unions are required to submit their audited membership at the end of every financial year to the bargaining council, which it must further audit.
In terms of discrepancies between members submitted by unions and membership verified through the National Treasury, the PSA has recorded the most unaccounted membership figures among the 10 affected unions, at 9 279.
Of the 77892 members submitted by the PSA to the council as of December31 last year, only 68613 could be verified by the Persal (payroll system) report submitted by the Treasury.
According to the report, the unions denied inflating membership and instead said deductions form their members were being cancelled where no cancellation letter had been received by the unions, and that some members took leave without pay, as some of the reasons they could not account for their stated membership.
Yesterday, PSA deputy general manager Tahir Maepa confirmed that despite the unions drawing money from the council based on their submitted memberships, not all of their members were paid up.
He said many of the unaccounted for members from the unions had their subscriptions cancelled, but not in line with the Labour Relations Act.
“People join the unions in terms of the Labour Relations Act, and they can terminate their membership in terms of the act, and the act prescribes how you terminate your labour relations,” Maepa said. “We are not denying that we are not receiving money from these members, but what we are saying is that those people never cancelled their membership with the PSA.”
He alleged that there was a conspiracy within the public service where public servants working with Persal cancelled subscriptions for the PSA.
“We also know the politics behind this and we are working on it. Persal must explain because we have organisational rights. There is no reason for them to allow cancellations without people complying with the Labour Relations Act,” he said.
The report could see all Saftu unions – including its biggest affiliate in the council, Nupsaw – removed from the council as their real combined membership has been exposed as not meeting the 30000 minimum threshold for participating in the council.
Nupsaw’s general secretary, Success Mataitsane, said the report, which stated that 3250 of its 27025 members were unaccounted for, was biased and aimed at removing Saftu unions from the council.
He said most of the unaccounted for members were community healthcare workers who were being paid through a private service provider.
“The Gauteng Department of Health has outsourced the payroll of its community health workers. We have over 3000 members who are community health workers,” Mataitsane said.
Most unions did not respond to questions by the time of publication.
The original of this report by Siviwe Feketha appeared on page 7 of The Star of 30 October 2018
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Sowetan reports that a junior member at the EFF office in North West claims that she lost her job for speaking out about her alleged assault by the party’s chief whip in the provincial legislature. Maggie Klaas, who worked as an administrator at the EFF’s office, said she was fired on Thursday.
Klaas said she was accused of bringing the name of the party into disrepute by talking about the alleged assault to the media.
In November, Klaas opened a case of assault with the police, accusing her direct manager Bungas Ntsangane of threatening to cut off her private parts before physically assaulting her. The two were allegedly fighting for an office key.
This, according to Klaas, happened in full view of other legislature members. Klaas said on Thursday she was shocked when she received a letter telling her that her contract has been terminated. She said she sought an explanation but the party management would not budge. She said she has been working for EFF for more than two years but had never experienced such hostility.
“They started treating me bad after I reported the incident to the police; they tried on several occasions to force me to drop the charges or face dismissal,” she said.
She said what Ntsangane did to her was wrong. “Instead of getting the support from the party after he assaulted me, I received a hostile treatment,” Klaas said. Provincial party spokesman Jerry Matebesi said Klaas was never forced to drop the case of alleged assault against Ntsangane. He said Klaas was dismissed for refusing to comply with a lawful instruction to attend a staff meeting.
He said Klaas also refused to work at the EFF’s provincial office when she was requested to do so to beef up the election machinery.
Matebesi said Klaas unlawfully disseminated information to the media about internal affairs of the EFF, thus bringing the party into disrepute since she was not authorised to speak to the media. He said Klaas behaved in a rude manner in front of other staff members during her meeting with head of human resources, Namhle Ncobo. “She screamed, banged the table and left the meeting while the head of HR was still addressing her,” Matebesi said. “Her inability to complete basic tasks like typing of a letter forced the HR department to consider capacity building programmes for her.”
But Klaas dismissed the allegations levelled against her. “They claim they fired me because I did not follow instructions. Yes, I refused to drop the charges.”
The case against Ntsangane has been postponed to November 13 by the Mmabatho magistrate’s court for investigation.
The original of this report by Boitumelo Tshehle appeared on page 9 of Sowetan of 22 October 2018
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Business Report writes that President Cyril Ramaphosa begins preparations for his investment summit later this month on a high after securing backing from some of the country’s biggest conglomerates to assist his jobs creation drive.
Ramaphosa also managed to secure commitments from organised businesses that all alternatives needed to be explored before retrenchments were effected.
Businesses also agreed to sacrifice executive salary hikes and forgo dividends.
The financial sector said it would invest R100 billion over five years in black-owned industrial enterprises as part of its transformation commitments.
Absa chief executive Maria Ramos said on the sidelines of the summit that it was a joint effort to turn the tide for the economy.
“The president (Ramaphosa) cannot do this on his own and the government can’t do this on its own. We all have to put our shoulders to the wheel,” Ramos said, adding that the upcoming investment conference needed to be supported domestically.
However, the jury remains out on whether the two-day inaugural Jobs Summit would deliver the 275 000 annual jobs in a troubled economy that has fallen into technical recession.
NKC Research said the proposals to create new jobs while maintaining existing ones would put Ramaphosa’s credibility to the test.
“The summit will prove to be a critical credibility test for Ramaphosa and its success or failure will in no small part be influencing public perceptions of the president,” the group’s Gary Van Staden said.
“But unless the government embarks on a fundamental rethink of the economy and what promotes real sustainable growth above 5 percent, this summit, like so many before it, is doomed to fail.”
The summit saw business, labour and government agreeing to more than 70 commitments aimed at unlocking job creation and boosting economic growth.
In the past few months the country has lost jobs with Statistics South Africa’s quarterly report indicating that 69 000 people became jobless in the second quarter. The National Planning Commission confirmed that the government’s plan to cut unemployment to single digits by 2030 would be impossible to realise.
But Ramos said the summit was a huge opportunity for South Africa to create jobs and improve business confidence.
“Domestic investment is where you start,” she said “We expect foreigners to come and invest here, well that is interesting if we don’t invest in the country, who else will invest?”
The original of this report by Dineo Faku appeared on page 13 of Business Report of 8 October 2018
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Sunday Times Business Times reports that billions of rands earmarked by the National Skills Fund (NSF) for the development of badly needed artisans have been blown by the government on university students instead, says NSF CEO Mvuyisi Macikama.
"Our money has been spent for something other than the key areas we're supposed to be focusing on," he says.
SA is so short of artisans it is having to import them.
Universities, on the other hand, are churning out so many students with "soft" degrees that the market cannot absorb them.
Macikama said in the NSF's 2017-2018 annual report tabled in parliament this week that the department of higher education & training had taken R6.56bn from the NSF's accumulated surplus to pay for the government's no-fee increase promise to university students.
In 2016, NSF coffers were raided to the tune of R1.27bn, and this shot up to a whopping R5.28bn last year. Macikama says by 2019-2020 there will be no surplus left.
The NSF intended spending R1.5bn of this money on "reactivating" the capacity of state-owned enterprises like Eskom, Transnet, Denel and SAA Technical to provide the kind of artisan training they did in the past before being hollowed out by state-sponsored looters.
It had allocated another R1.5bn to turn the country's technical and vocational education and training colleges, most of which he says are just glorified schools, into institutions that offer "occupationally directed" programmes.
"All of these major plans have been badly hampered by the fact that we had to redirect our resources to meet the demands of Fees Must Fall," he says.
The NSF had no say in the matter.
"A decision was taken that there should be no fee increase. That zero-increase policy was not funded through the fiscus and so the department had to look around to see what it could tap into."
The NSF was told it would be a "one-off", but then came the "free fees" announcement.
"We didn't know there would be another policy coming which would be almost a permanent feature of the higher education system."
A no-increase, let alone free, fee policy is "absolutely not sustainable", he says. "Absolutely not. It is a totally unsustainable policy."
He says the skills the NSF is mandated to target are mostly not taught at university but due to the department's intervention, its money is being spent on university students regardless of what they're studying.
This will make the National Development Plan's goal of 30,000 artisans a year by 2030 impossible to meet, he says. Only 21,000 artisans a year are being produced at the moment.
Although other bodies such as the Sector Education and Training Authorities are supposed to deliver on this as well, "you could say the NSF is a critical player in this space".
Businesses in the metals and engineering sector that are desperate for skilled artisans and paid skills levies of R3bn to the NSF last year have communicated their concern that NSF money is being channelled into keeping fees down for social sciences and humanities students at university.
"We're going through a consultation process with them, and these are the concerns that have been raised and continue to be raised," says Macikama.
"They have expressed their anger, but they realise that there is currently a funding reality in the country as far as universities are concerned."
He says the higher education and training department shouldn't have treated the NSF's budget as its own, but had little choice.
"It should not have. But when there is a policy directive like this that is approved at the highest level, and is inclusive of the National Treasury, how can an institution act against that reality?"
The argument he met from the department was that the NSF's mandate was to provide skills required by the country, and skills provided by universities are required by the country.
Engineering and medical, perhaps, but social sciences and humanities?
"Maybe not on the scale that is currently the case," he says. There are more students with these qualifications than the market is able to process, he says.
Meanwhile, businesses are having to import the skills they require.
What Macikama finds perhaps more alarming is that South African institutions no longer have the capacity to offer training in badly needed specialist skills.
"Hence we are sending more and more students to other countries to gain the kind of skills that industry requires."
He says the shortage of artisans is hampering the rollout of the government's infrastructure development programme.
Thanks to private-sector support, NSF plans to have 26 "centres of specialisation" up and running at technical and vocational training colleges from January next year are still on track, he says.
The private sector is "showing willingness in a very big way to ensure that they succeed and give us on a consistent basis the skills needed".
Macikama says the policy environment is being "tightened up" to meet the need for assurances that the money the private sector contributes will not be hijacked by the department to meet government no-fee-increase commitments.
"We can't give any guarantees but we can contribute to tightening the policy environment so that the lines are clearly defined."
The need for certainty about how the skills levy will be utilised is something it emphasised, he said. At all the meetings this issue "has been at the centre".
He says the centres of specialisation are intended to play the role of the old discarded apprenticeship system.
"This is about industry being at the forefront so that the ones we indenture in these programmes at the centres of specialisation don't just go there as people who want to enter an institution, but go there because industry has sent them there and wants them there to acquire specific skills."
Macikama, 45, who has been CEO since 2011, says he doesn't know why the apprenticeship system was done away with, but fortunately "quite a number of industries never really stopped it".
"Manufacturing in the country could have collapsed altogether if they had not kept it going, even if on a smaller scale."
The original of this report by Chris Barron appeared on page 8 of Sunday Times Business Times of 7 October 2018
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Sowetan reports that several employees of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) have accused their bosses of purging them for not supporting the union’s current leaders at the previous conference.
In July, a total of 10 employees received letters from NUM’s general secretary David Sipunzi, informing them that they were being moved to other regions “for the benefit of the organisation”.
In the letter, Sipunzi informed the workers, who are mostly line managers in the NUM regions, that the transfer “will not have any effect” on their salaries, and it was effective from September 3.
But the workers are fuming as they say they are being purged because they supported Piet Matosa, who lost the position of president to his former deputy, Joseph Montisetse, at the NUM conference held in June.
One of the workers who received the letter has since resigned from the NUM.
Workers who have been moved said this would have a negative impact on their families. Some workers were moved from Limpopo to Northern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal to Western Cape, Gauteng to Eastern Cape, Cape Town to Limpopo and Rustenburg to Mpumalanga.
“We just received letters without any consultation. We received the letters on July 26 and then lodged a grievance. We escalated the matter to the national committee. Before we even got response from the committee, we were locked out of our offices,” said one worker.
Sipunzi rejected the allegations by the workers. “I am not aware of any employee of the union who supported a particular leader during the conference,” he said.
Sipunzi said employees have no role to play on who gets elected.
“In this instance, after assessing our performance in the previous three years, we decided that maybe we can change the way we do things. We can improve in terms of growing our membership base. There is no demotion in that.”
The workers have taken the NUM to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration and the matter will be heard this week.
The original of this report by Penwell Dlamini appeared on page 5 of Sowetan of 1 October 2018
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