ActionSA has backed the City of Tshwane’s commitment to pay wage increases owed to workers dating back to 2021/22 as per the ruling from the South African Local Government Bargaining Council earlier this month.
The party has maintained that its long-standing view has been to either renegotiate these agreements or honour them.
ActionSA national chairperson Michael Beaumont insisted that his party has always raised the risk of a contingent liability of years of salary issues should the workers’ matter be ignored.
“Ignoring them and waiting for a multi-year legal process to conclude was irresponsible. In internal and public engagements on the matter, we have warned of years of salary increases having to be back paid when it is inevitably found that the City has to meet its agreed commitments or renegotiate new ones.”
However, DA Tshwane led by former mayor Cilliers Brink has petitioned the executive to appeal the ruling, complaining that the city will go bankrupt should it adhere to the will of the court.
In a statement from his party, Brink dismissed the bargaining council’s decision to award backdated salary increases as “legally flawed and financially ruinous”.
“Earlier this year the City of Tshwane won a case in the labour court against paying 5.6% salary increases for the 2023/24 financial year on the grounds of affordability. The court held that the bargaining council had misdirected itself in finding that Tshwane could afford to pay these increases.
“Affordability was the basis on which the council approved the exemption application in 2023, with the supporting vote of the ANC and ActionSA. The resultant saving of R600m enabled the city to reach a favourable payment arrangement with Eskom — bulk electricity purchases being the second-biggest operational expense of any municipality next to salaries.”
If not taken on review, he warned that the decision will be paid for by residents in the form of deteriorating service delivery and infrastructure.
“What will that cost the City? On a conservative estimate at least R1.4bn one-off, without taking into account the escalation in benefits that have been approved in the succeeding financial years. In addition, the city will have to find about R400m extra in every succeeding financial year beyond the baseline payout,” he alleged.
The former DA mayor argued that the reasons provided in favour of workers lacked the most elementary assessment of whether the city is able to afford the R1.4bn bill in the next six months.
“In fact, the entire decision seems to have been taken without regard to the city’s current financial position. The DA believes that, as with the incompetent decision of the bargaining council to approve the 2023/24 exemption application by Tshwane, the city has strong grounds to take the decision about the 2021/22 salary increases on judicial review to the labour court. Failure to do so would derail the city’s entire financial recovery process.”
Despite the alarms raised now by the opposition party, ActionSA’s Beaumont maintains that the problem lies at the doorstep of the DA, which “at the time fought vigorously against paying.”
“As a consequence of this ruling, the city and its residents must now pay R1.6bn in backdated salary increases owing to its municipal workers, rather than the R489m that it refused to pay in 2021/2022. This comes as yet another inherited legacy of eight years of failed DA governance in the City of Tshwane that continues to burden our capital even after the departure of previous mayors.”
“One would imagine that such an expensive revelation of the DA’s myth of good governance in Gauteng would have resulted in humility on the part of former mayor Brink and the DA, but one would be wrong.
“The DA has sought to campaign on this latest crisis of its own making as it continues a campaign of ambulance-chasing in a desperate attempt to deflect from the reality that it drove the capital city into the ground,” he said.
The DA has communicated that they will be penning a letter to Tshwane city manager Johann Mettler to publish the exact assessment of the costs of implementing the bargaining council award.
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