Pretoria - The cash-strapped City of Tshwane continues to lose millions of rand because of the ongoing strike action by employees over wage increases.
The metro’s budget, according to the municipality, is further stretched by the damages to buildings, infrastructure damages and the torching of municipal buildings as a result of the unprotected strike.
Other costs the municipality has to incur is paying overtime to metropolitan police officers to escort workers to job sites.
Municipal employees have over the past few months been involved in a dispute against management over a 5.4% pay increase which the City has refused to pay, citing bankruptcy.
Addressing the media last week, mayor Cilliers Brink along with city manager Johan Mettler, said the violent nature of the strike had cost the municipality.
But the duo could not say how much exactly the strike had cost the City.
They could only confirm that the bill was running into millions of rand.
Municipality spokesperson Selby Bokaba said in due course the City would calculate the full cost of the strike.
“There is a form that has been sent out to all the departments for them to populate … to indicate what was the impact of the strike on them, what losses they suffered.
“They will also calculate what assets were destroyed. We have to collate all the information and check after we have done all of these exercises and check with the insurance in order for the municipality to claim.”
Bokaba said the City was forced to increase contractors since the beginning of the strike.
“The budget of contracting services would be under severe pressure due to the frequency in which the contracted services are being used.”
Meanwhile the City, through Mettler, announced that it had started the process of replacing the 128 workers it had handed dismissal letters for participating in the unlawful strike.
Mettler said the vacant posts had already been advertised and the process (to replace them) had started.
He said: “I have given instructions to the relevant departments that have lost employees as a result of them being dismissed due to their participation in an unprotected strike, that an advertisement for the filling of those positions must commence immediately and that process is currently under way.”
He also said two members of the SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) were dismissed after being found to have been involved in the torching of municipal trucks.
He said the two employees, who worked as drivers, a regional deputy chairperson, Tlou Zebulon Matlala, and Sekopo Hendrick Mashatola were fired after being captured on video.
Brink has stressed that the City could not afford to pay the increases.
He said it was improbable that a deal could be negotiated with Samwu because its position on no wage increases was unlikely to change.
Pretoria News