Durban - The move by the city to cut the amount of overtime pay that can be claimed by eThekwini Municipality workers is threatening to derail service delivery in the city, with different service delivery units striking or planning strikes in the coming week.
Durban Solid Waste (DSW) staff members downed tools last month after their overtime pay was cut by limiting the hours they could work. The staff in the electricity department downed tools on Friday, apparently over the same issue.
This week councillors in the Umbilo area complained about the lack of refuse collection in their area as some of the areas had not seen any collections or street sweeping for the past six weeks.
They said they understood that the lack of service delivery was due in part to the cut to overtime pay.
DA councillor Sakhile Mngadi said areas in his ward such as Umbilo and Glenwood were on the verge of a health crisis because of the uncollected refuse.
“About 90% of the area of Umbilo has not seen any collections for more than 6 weeks and about 50% of the Glenwood area has not seen any collections.
“The depot that services us is the Collingwood depot, we have been told that the reason we have not seen any services was because they do not have enough trucks and the ones they have constantly break down.
“But myself and a colleague from Yellowwood Park visited the depot recently and we found the trucks just parked there,” he said.
Mngadi said they were privately informed that there was also a labour dispute unfolding in the unit.
“Earlier last month, the municipality implemented overtime pay cuts. Part of the problem was that some of the drivers of these trucks were employed as general workers initially and seconded to driving trucks and were getting allowances for that.
“After the overtime and allowances were cut, the drivers decided they would go back to being general workers, but the city resolved to appoint them to these positions full time which has sparked a labour dispute as some people are now arguing that appointing these employees as drivers would be an unfair process,” he said.
“It’s not only the refuse collection unit that is facing a strike, this weekend, the electricity employees also downed tools.
“We had been warned that the staff members are striking and the response times might be slow but I must commend the staff who are working, there was an outage in my ward and they responded to it very quickly,” said Mngadi.
A senior manager in the municipality, who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorised to speak to the media, said the strike within the electricity department was still on and it was serious. The management was expected to address all the depots this week.
“Even with electricity, it’s the issue of overtime, the workers downed tools on Friday and they are not back yet,” said the source.
Asked for comment on the refuse collection issues, head of DSW Raymond Rampersad said the issue of overtime was extremely difficult to handle and the council might have to make an exception for essential services.
“The overtime is limited to 40 hours a week, and the management is playing by the rules and not allowing people to exceed that,” said Rampersad.
He said part of the problem was the ageing fleet that resulted in many breakdowns, “another problem is the overtime issue that management is now controlling, you could find that we have the trucks but not the drivers because they have reached the 40 hours of overtime”.
He also said there was a labour dispute over the appointment of general workers as drivers.
He said the backlog in the affected areas would be cleared by this week.
Maxwell Mthembu, the head of Electricity, said he would meet the officials and labour unions today to understand what was behind the strike as he was not aware of any labour dispute.
“I do not believe that this was as a result of overtime, we have not limited our overtime to the 40 hours that have been mentioned. I have directed our managers to manage our overtime based on the budget that we have.
“I do not want to have a situation whereby I limit overtime and we have storms where there are more faults that need to be repaired and people end up not wanting to work because they have reached the limit of their overtime hours.”