Another union shop steward at a public TVET college has been fired for intimidating a colleague to attend a workers’ meeting.
TD Matlala became the second lecturer and unionist at Westcol TVET College, Randfontein, to be axed over a strike incident that some staffers complained was tantamount to intimidation.
Stanley Ngoako Moshobane, who belonged to the Health and Allied Workers’ Union, received his marching orders in October after being found to have intimidated a colleague, Chantal Labuschagne.
Matlala, a shop steward for the Public Servants Association, learnt her fate last week at the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC). Matlala and Moshobane faced sanctions over the same strike action on August 16, 2018.
ELRC commissioner Nzwisisai Dandadzi found Matlala guilty of intimidating Joanna Christina Coetzee, her colleague who had lectured at Westcol since 1987, by banging on her classroom door and table.
Coetzee testified that Matlala also shouted at her when instructing her to attend the workers’ meeting.
The matter came before Dandadzi as Matlala’s application intended to overturn the October, 2020 decision of the Department of Higher Education and Training to axe her.
The department found her guilty of charges that included improper conduct, disruption of teaching and learning, as well as intimidation.
Dandadzi heard Matlala’s evidence aiming to crush the internal guilty verdict.
Matlala submitted that she could not have disrupted teaching because there were no students in classes on that day. Students were engaged in a protest of their own and not in class, she said.
Matlala denied intimidating Coetzee, who testified that she was forced to stop teaching. She argued that because Coetzee and other colleagues did not attend the workers’ meeting, they could not have been intimidated.
But Dandadzi found that Coetzee was intimidated by Matlala. She concluded that Coetzee’s evidence that she was teaching was not challenged, notwithstanding Matlala’s submission that there were no students on campus that day.
“I am inclined to accept that applicant in her conduct intimidated her colleagues and disrupted teaching and learning, because as a result of (her) conduct the students in Mrs Coetzee’s class left and Mrs Coetzee went to find out why she was required to attend a meeting that she had received no invitation for,” said Dandadzi.
“Intimidation is a very serious issue in the workplace, and a sanction of dismissal for acts of intimidation is not in my view a harsh sanction.
“I find that the dismissal of the applicant, TD Matlala, was substantively fair,” she said.
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