Tshwarelo Hunter Mogakane
Pretoria - The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) has blamed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration for the Road Accident Fund (RAF) management’s plan to retrench workers.
Numsa secretary-general Irvin Jim said the RAF had been on a mission to retrench workers since 2020, but was now using the union to rubber-stamp its decision.
“The management of RAF attempted to get the union to rubber-stamp their strategy to guillotine workers and cut over 400 jobs through a dodgy restructuring process, which was outside of the CCMA process.
“RAF management began contemplating restructuring as early as 2020 when they contracted PWC and since then, discussions have been taking place behind the scenes to restructure the company.
“They began to implement this strategy around June 2022. The facts are that RAF management had already taken a decision to retrench at least 472 employees when it declared that some positions would be redundant because of the implementation of the new, untested Integrated Claims Management System,” said Jim.
Numsa is adamant the RAF deliberately wanted to create an impression that they were involved in initiating the retrenchment of the workers.
“RAF management are lying when they claim that they put measures in place to ‘mitigate the effects of section 189’. Numsa is against any job losses and we made that clear to them from the beginning.
“However, RAF executives set up what they termed 'information sharing sessions' within the Central Bargaining Committee, a forum where we negotiate matters of mutual interest, in order to consult the union on this process. The RAF was attempting to get the union to rubber-stamp an unlawful process.
“The problem with the committee is that it only has power to negotiate collective bargaining issues whereas restructuring is a totally different process and it should be externally managed by the CCMA to ensure that the interests of all parties, particularly employees, are protected,“ said Jim.
Jim added that the union was not idle in the entire retrenchment issue.
“We exposed them and confronted them for attempting to retrench via the back door, without following proper processes as recognised by the CCMA and the Labour Relations Act.
“Already the RAF management was targeting individuals outside the bargaining unit to accept their voluntary severance packages.
“This is why we had to intervene to ensure that workers’ rights would not be undermined in the process,” said Jim.
The union further accused RAF of attempting to justify job losses because they want to introduce an automated system estimated to cost the fund R1 billion.
This was a clear sign that the ANC-led government did not care for workers, said Jim.
“The purpose of state-owned entities is that they enable the government to create jobs, but under this administration of Ramaphosa we have seen massive job cuts which will only deepen poverty and unemployment.
“In our view rather than RAF management focusing on retrenching workers, they should put their focus onto where it is required, such as the rising increase of claims caused by many factors, including the state of our roads and rail in the country due to ailing infrastructure.
“Secondly the corruption taking place through lawyers and medical practitioners which continues to rip off the RAF at the cost of taxpayers also requires urgent intervention,” Jim said.
Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya and RAF spokesperson Linda Rulashe were not immediately available for comment.
Pretoria News