Pretoria - The City of Tshwane should first absorb its outsourced security guards before recruiting from advertised posts.
The guards were among the municipal workers who picketed outside Tshwane House for salary increases on Thursday. They said they had been protesting and engaging the City over demanding permanent employment for years. They wanted the City to abandon outsourced contractors.
Leader of the group Isaac Ngwenya said: “For many years we fought long and hard for the municipality to absorb us because we have been working for the City for so many years. However, now the City of Tshwane wants to recruit us through advertised posts.
“We are saying we do not mind if there are other members of society joining in the jobs that we do for the City, but we are saying the municipality must least first absorb the men and women who’ve been working for it all these years.
“We have fears that some of our brothers and sisters may not be hired through this recruitment process. We feel that we fought hard to get here, and this is our struggle, and now that we finally have a mayor and mayoral committee that listens to us, this way of doing things should be reconsidered as it may leave out some of our brothers and sisters who fought for this.”
A letter from Mayor Steven Mokgalapa in April said the City encouraged qualifying security personnel to apply for vacancies.