Legal Aid staff protest over deteriorating working conditions

The lawyers and support staff who provide legal representation to South Africa’s poorest citizens say they are overworked, underpaid and struggling to make ends meet.

Those frustrations spilled on to the streets of Braamfontein, in Johannesburg, on Wednesday as members of the SA Legal Workers Union launched a two-day nationwide protest, saying years of underfunding and frozen posts had left employees overworked and stretched to breaking point.

The protest will continue in Pretoria on Thursday, where workers are expected to march to the department of justice and constitutional development headquarters to hand over a memorandum.

Reading the memorandum outside Legal Aid SA’s offices in Johannesburg, union president Andile Mavatha said workers had exhausted all avenues of engagement.

“We did not wake up one morning and decide to come here. These are long-standing issues that have remained unresolved,” he said.

Mavatha said many of the union’s grievances dated back to 2019 and included the reversal of employee benefits, unfilled vacancies, salary disparities, poor working conditions and what he described as a lack of meaningful support from the department of justice.

“The result is unreasonable workload. It affects our wellbeing, compromises the quality of work and ultimately affects the mandate of the organisation,” he said.

The union has accused the department of implementing budget cuts and freezing critical posts, saying remaining employees are expected to do more work with fewer resources.

Thabo Zulu, who has worked at Johannesburg Legal Aid for nine years, said conditions had deteriorated significantly.

“The situation is bad. We provide everything for ourselves, including a writing pen,” he said.

Zulu told TimesLIVE, “we have a lot of workload and posts are frozen without any reason, but they still expect efficient work. We are overworked with little salary”.

Thembelihle Nkosi said the pressure of trying to help clients with limited resources had taken a personal toll.

“Clients see us as incompetent and think we are not working, whereas there is no human capital and no one at a higher level is assisting,” she said.

“I have even lost weight because of work stress, trying to help clients with the little that you can, and they are not seeing it”, said Nkosi.

Another employee from Pretoria legal office said workers were battling financially despite years of service.

“The economy is getting worse and we can’t even meet everything that we need to do. You can’t buy a house and a car at the same time with our salaries. We are just fighting for our rights,” the employee said.

The union said the situation has been worsened by the mandatory retirement of experienced Legal Aid lawyers at the age of 60, while their counterparts at the National Prosecuting Authority and members of the judiciary could continue working until between 65 and 70 years of age.

Mavatha said Legal Aid was losing experienced practitioners at a time when the institution was already battling staff shortages.

He also accused the new board of failing employees and called for its resignation, alleging that it had failed to address workers concerns and had contributed to a toxic working environment.

“We are demanding that the entire board of directors resign,” said Mavatha.

The union is also demanding the filling of vacant posts, proper implementation of occupational specific dispensation policies, salary benchmarking and meaningful financial support for Legal Aid SA.

The union has given the board and management 10 days to respond to its demands.

Responding to the memorandum, Legal Aid SA deputy chairperson adv Kgotso Maja said management would carefully consider the workers’ demands.

“We will familiarise ourselves with the contents of the memorandum and consider carefully each one of the proposals contained in here,” he said.

The board acknowledged the concerns raised by workers and said it was committed to finding “amicable, meaningful and sustainable solutions”.

TimesLIVE