Eskom wants to fire 2,000 skilled workers: union
Trade union Solidarity says it has a court application calling on the Labour Court to, inter alia, declare Eskom’s current affirmative action plan invalid.
The union believes that this plan will further deplete Eskom’s skills corps and exacerbate the power crisis.
Solidarity said its court application is based on procedural as well as substantive objections. It argues that Eskom has failed to engage in sufficient consultations with the parties concerned regarding its new affirmative action plan before the plan was finalised.
In addition, the numerical targets contained in Eskom’s affirmative action plan are only based on the national racial demographics; therefore, it does not take the racial distribution of potentially relevant qualifications into account at all.
Eskom has compiled and submitted an employment equity plan to the DoL. The impugned plan is operative for the period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016.
The plan will see black male employees reduced from 19,286 to 17,600, coloured male workers from 2,511 to 2,317, Indian males from 1,050 to 935, white men from 5,495 to 4,594, Indian women from 611 to 551 and white women from 2,146 to 1,967.
Current Eskom employee distribution
According to Solidarity, the only racial and gender groups that will not be reduced in terms of the plan are black female employees and coloured female workers.
“Qualifications are not distributed equally among the different population groups. It is therefore unreasonable for Eskom to expect that job levels requiring specific qualifications should reflect the racial distribution of the population,” said Solidarity deputy secretary Johan Kruger.
Kruger explained that over the next year, Eskom wanted to get rid of about 1,967 professionally qualified and skilled employees as part of its plans. In addition, the power utility has already announced plans in terms of which the national racial demographics should be reflected at all levels in the company by 31 March 2020.
“Eskom’s employees possess specialised knowledge and experience that cannot be easily replaced. Eskom is therefore sacrificing essential skills in order to achieve its ideology of national racial representativeness. It is a lose-lose situation,” said Kruger.
Dirk Groenewald, head of Solidarity’s Centre for Fair Labour Practices, said the union also added the Department of Labour as a party to the court case as it supports these irrational targets.
More on Eskom and Solidarity
‘We have Eskom’s racial plan in front of us’
What it’s like to be white and work at Eskom
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