ANC staff remain on work stayaway over unpaid salaries
|Published
Cape Town 21-11-2021 Several ANC leaders employed in the party’s head office, Luthuli House, yesterday joined staff protesting outside the venue of the special national executive committee (NEC) over non-payment of salaries.
ANC staff will remain on what their representatives have labelled a “full-blown stayaway” from party offices due to their employer’s failure to meet contractual obligations, including the party’s inability to pay salaries.
ANC staff representative Mvusi Mdala has painted a grim picture of what the party’s staff members at its Luthuli House headquarters -- and several other provinces -- were being subjected to.
“Luthuli House, Western Cape, Free State and North West had not received salaries for January, while in the North West there were staff members who had last received salaries in October, Mdala said.
“We will be on stayaway until every staff member is back paid their salaries. If tomorrow every staff member is paid up, and not even a single one is owed his or her salaries, we will reconvene as staff and see what we do,” he said.
Following the ANC NEC meeting over the weekend, media reports said that the party’s national spokesperson and NEC member Pule Mabe had suggested that the ANC retrenches staff members to ease the financial burden on the party, which is hugely dependent on donor funding.
“That (retrenchments) is a non starter,” Mdala said. “I think Pule Mabe is just becoming a populist on the approach on this, and also we've noted that when it’s convenient for him, he speaks as a person who’s affected by the non-payment of salaries for opportunistic reasons.”
Mdala also called for the ANC to prioritise paying the staff’s provident fund (contributions), which he said had last been paid in November 2018, and to also pay UIF, that had not been paid for about four years.
“You can’t have an organisation that relies on donations to pay its workers on a month-to-month basis, and therefore its members must support the organisation for it to work in a sustainable way.
“Unfortunately we are at a disadvantage as staff to speak on what needs to be done, because we don’t how much the ANC is getting from the party funding. We don’t know the current money it’s receiving from levies of all members of Parliament, councillors and MPLs, and how that money is being used,” Mdala said.
ANC NEC member and national spokesperson Pule Mabe said that it was unfair that he was being singled out as an individual NEC member when it had been the NEC that had reached consensus on the issue of organisational redesign, which also includes retrenching staff.
“The reality is that what has been happening over the past few months, where the party faces challenges to sometimes fulfil its monthly obligations, as those in the employ of the ANC do require some form of certainty; certainty means knowing that by month end they will be getting what they shall have invested their labour towards,” Mabe said.
“A caring ANC has got, from time to time, to reflect on its own capability to be able to carry on, on those recurring liabilities that have got to happen month on month, including paying of staff salaries,” Mabe said.