Contract workers employed by the City of Tshwane picket outside the Tshwane House.
More than 500 former City of Tshwane contract workers have vowed to approach the Labour Court seeking to review the latest SA Local Government Bargaining Council’s ruling that there was no basis to hire them permanently.
Workers have been fighting to be reinstated with permanent positions since their 12-month contracts were terminated in October 2020, after they were employed at the metro in 2019.
In a bid for permanent posts, workers have previously marched to Tshwane House and have also approached the Bargaining Council.
At the council, they argued that they had been dismissed unfairly by the City.
On February 28, 2022, the council ruled in their favour, ordering the City to take them back as permanent employees.
Council commissioner Joseph Mphaphuli, at the time, ordered the municipality to pay each worker an arrears salary of at least R115 000. The salaries were to cover the duration of employment that they would have earned had it not been for “unfair dismissal”.
The City, however, took the ruling on review and it obtained a favourable outcome following the reassessment by the same Bargaining Council.
Now, workers’ representative Mzuvele Cele told the Pretoria News that the fight to be reinstated was far from over, and said that they had instructed their lawyers to approach the Labour Court.
He expressed shock at the Bargaining Council's U-turn on its initial ruling that workers must be reinstated.
“Workers already have their lawyers to file papers at the Labour Court with a view to review the ruling,” he said.
He hoped that the matter would have been filed by the end of January, awaiting a date for the matter to be ventilated in court.
Cele accused the City of failing to alert workers in time before the expiry of their contracts that they were not up for renewal.
He said workers were confident that they would win the case at the Labour Court and anticipated that it might be a long drawn-out case for 2024.
The City said it had employed 513 workers, through a labour broker, to assist with waste management on a fixed 12-month contract from November 2019 until October 31, 2020.
“Upon expiry of their contract, the workers demanded to be permanently absorbed as city employees,” it said.
Former general workers previously pitched for work after the Bargaining Council ruling went in their favour, but they were blocked from entering municipal premises.
Initially, the City wanted to approach the Labour Court to challenge the ruling, but it opted to exhaust the process of reviewing the ruling at the same Bargaining Council.
Pretoria News