Johannesburg - Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba and his Tshwane counterpart Solly Msimanga escaped removal by succumbing to EFF pressure to improve the lives of the marginalised workers, said party deputy president Floyd Shivambu.
He told the private and public sector security guards who packed Durban’s Emmanuel Cathedral on Sunday to vote for his party if they want to see their working conditions improve.
The EFF is crisscrossing the country collecting views of the low paid workers in order to beef up its election manifesto.
Shivambu said that even if the EFF does not win the elections it needed enough votes to keep whichever party wins the elections below 50%, so that it can be pressured to listen to workers.
He said Mashaba had succumbed to the EFF’s threats to vote him out by agreeing to insource ordinary workers of the municipality.
“We have started to insource all the workers in Johannesburg municipality, and there is no security guard in that municipality who is paid less than R7000.
“There is no security guard in the Johannesburg municipality who does not have a medical aid, provident fund and all the benefits including bonuses,” he said.
In that municipality, the EFF had begun to change the lives of people who were paid R2100 without any provident fund or medical aid.
Shivambu said the EFF had withdrawn its motion of no confidence against Msimanga after he had also agreed to terminate outsourcing security guards. “He was delaying the insourcing of security workers, and on the day we were supposed to remove him the council took a resolution that all of its security workers are going to be insourced and be paid not less than R8000. “So if you know anyone who was working in the city of Johannesburg as a security guard employed by a middleman or by a contractor you must ask them about their conditions now,” he said.
Shivambu said that on Saturday he met employees of the tourism industry in Mpumalanga, and later mine workers in Rustenburg.
“The president (Julius Malema) was meeting on Sunday with the small scale mine workers who are so-called Zama Zamas in Limpopo. The president is meeting with police officers and soldiers to understand what do we do when we take over government,” he said.