Unions ready for war over government’s plan to cut jobs
During a question and answer session on Thursday (30 August), deputy president David Mabuza reinforced government’s plan to cut jobs and intentions to reduce the wage bill in the public service.
This follows similar commitments made by president Cyril Ramaphosa made during his state of the nation address in February.
In response, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) said that it was ‘distraught’ over plans that the public service will be scaled down as part of cost-cutting measures.
In a statement on Friday, the trade union added that it rejects any reconfiguration of government that will result in a ‘job bloodbath’.
“When the media ran a story about government’s plan to shed jobs the national union warned government about such a detrimental move and vowed to fire with fire. The Department of Public Service and Administration [DPSA] quickly issued a statement to allay our fears and dispelled the notion of the impending job losses,” it said.
“We are, however, infuriated by the confirmation by the Deputy President that the public service will be scaled down as part of austerity measures. As things stand, the public service is already heavily understaffed because of austerity measures introduced by National Treasury.
“We vehemently rejected the tired, widely held, but false belief that the public service is bloated. Currently we have about 1.3 million public servants servicing a population of 52 million people. The lack of adequate personnel in the public service has resulted in service delivery being adversely affected especially in health and education.”
The union added that it will immediately start the process of mobilisation in the public service and society at large in preparation for a big fight against austerity measures and retrenchments.
“Working with other Cosatu public sector unions we will seek a meeting with government to sharply raise these issues. We also call on society at large to join our fight to save jobs,” it said.
“Once again, we want to put it unequivocally clear that we will find it very difficult to support the ANC in next year General Elections if it continues to fold its arms while job losses continue unabated.”
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