Pretoria - Tshwane mayor Randall Williams is on a collision course with the SA Municipal Workers Union after he refused to withdraw the advertisements for posts with a five-year contract and not aligned with his current term of office.
The contentious posts were linked to the mayor’s office, including that of his spokesperson as well as mayoral stakeholder management and community liaison.
Other vacancies for divisional heads are performance monitoring and evaluation, economic intelligence, private office and protocol services and a senior strategic executive support specialist.
However, in terms of the specifications in the advert, they are for five years, while his term ends on the eve of the local government polls next year, and as it is the case in elections, re-election is never guaranteed.
The union has taken issue with the length of the contract ascribed to each post, which would go beyond the stay in office of the mayor and council.
The union’s regional secretary, Mpho Tladinyane, said Williams risked having the five-year contract appointments reversed should he not be re-elected after the 2021 municipal polls.
“Those posts can’t be for a period of five years. They must be aligned to a period of term of council. If the term of council is going to end in August next year, it means they must be aligned with that particular term,” he said.
He said that if the DA failed to win during the next year elections, it would mean that those posts would have to be readvertised.
“It has been happening that way all along that posts are advertised in line with the term of office of council. They (the DA) are just taking chances,” Tladinyane said.
He said the union intended to challenge Williams’s decision at the Local Government Bargaining Council.
“We will lodge a formal dispute at the bargaining council if they won't accede to what we are calling for,” he said.
However, Williams was unrepentant about his decision, saying he was simply following the City’s formal recruitment processes by advertising posts.
He threw down the gauntlet to the union to take him to court if it believed he was in the wrong.
“We are following policies and it is also the union’s responsibility to see that policy being implemented because if what we are doing is unlawful then unions need to go to court and stop us. I can assure you are following normal recruitment policies,” Williams said.
His chief of staff, Jordan Griffith, also shared the sentiment that there was nothing amiss committed by the mayor by advertising posts for a period of five years instead of 12 months as suggested by the union.
“The recruitment policy in the City of Tshwane allows for the advertising of these posts; there are requirements that are assigned to them,” he said,
He said the City decided to offer five-year contracts to successful candidates to create a competitive environment.
“People are not going to come into the civil service on temporary employment,” he said.
A short-listing process had already started on Wednesday and Thursday, he said.
“We saw that in the short-listing process; we saw some really high-powered candidates applying for some of the strategic posts in the office of the executive mayor. We are looking forward to interviewing these candidates and to assessing who could be best placed to support the mayor,” Griffith said. He rubbished the suggestion that Williams was under an obligation to tie the term of contract with his stay in office.
“Many folks could say there is an election that is going to happen and you shouldn’t appoint people in these roles for longer than 12 months. But that is incorrect because we don’t have a confirmed election date.” Griffith said Williams wanted to create institutional stability.
Pretoria News