Pretoria - The City of Tshwane has vowed to recoup a whopping R88.4 million paid to 627 general workers who drew monthly salaries for 12 months despite having been allocated no work.
The workers were hired by the City to assist at the waste management department on a fixed 12-month contract between November 2019 and October 2020.
This week the Pretoria News reported that the millions of rand spent on workers was flagged by Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke in the latest Municipal Finance Management Act report for 2020/2021. The payments were characterised as material irregularities, and the report explained that workers were taken on board without any work being allocated to them.
City spokesperson Selby Bokaba said an investigation into the questionable transaction was initiated in November last year, and “the City didn’t wait for the auditor-general to make her findings”.
“The City has initiated a forensic investigation into the employment and payment of the capacity workers between November 2019 and October 2020. The investigation will uncover who initiated the move, whether HR processes were flouted and who gave the instruction to employ those people, and whether there was a budget appropriated for that,” he said.
While Bokaba didn’t want to pre-empt the outcome of the investigation, he said the probe would determine who was liable for the payments and the City would then be in a position to recover the monies as per the recommendation of the A-G.
Over and above the investigation, Bokaba said, the City was challenging the decision of the South African Local Government Bargaining Council in the Labour Court.
The legal action by the City stemmed from a move spearheaded by the Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union on behalf of at least 88 of workers, who approached the bargaining council on the grounds that they had been unfairly dismissed following the termination of their contracts.
The bargaining council ruled that the workers had indeed been unfairly dismissed, and ordered the City to employ them permanently.
Bargaining Council commissioner Joseph Mphaphuli also ordered the City to pay each worker an arrear salary of R115 000 “that they would have earned for the duration of employment had it not been for unfair dismissal”.
He found that the applicants were employed as general workers, and that there was “no end to cleaning the City”.
“The job will always be there, and for that reason there will be no justification for employing cleaners on contract for a limited duration,” Mphaphuli said in his ruling.
The City approached the Labour Court in a bid to challenge the ruling.
Pretoria News