NEHAWU Supports COSATU In Rejecting Governments Intention To Renegade on 2018 Public Service Collective Agreement

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Wednesday February 26, 2020

The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union [NEHAWU] joins its federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU], in vehemently rejecting the intentions by government to renegade on the implementation of the 2018 public service wage agreement.

Yesterday, government made a proposal at the first Council meeting of the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council [PSCBC] to review the agreement because they can no longer afford to pay the 2020 salary increase. Government tabled an agenda item titled “Management of the Public Service Wage Bill” which basically means that they intend to review the PSCBC Resolution 1 of 2018 clause 3.3 which deals with the implementation of salary increases for public servants who are in the scope of the PSCBC.

NEHAWU has already made it unequivocally clear that the current wage agreements are sacrosanct and not open for review. We view any intention to review the 2018 agreement as a declaration of war. The national union will not enter into any discussion that seeks to take away what workers have gallantly fought for and reverse their gains. We hold a strong view that workers are punished for sins not of their making and we will not fold our arms while government insists on using workers as scapegoats for their failures to run a tight ship.

The national union has noted over a long period of time the consistent firmness by Treasury to reserve the gains of workers including wage freezes, cutting of benefits and cutting of jobs as part of rolling implementation of austerity measures meant to fix problems in the fiscus. We find it disturbing that every time when there are problems in the fiscus workers must face the brunt while government fails to curb all forms of irregular, wasteful, fruitless expenditure and material irregularities.

We find it both reckless and inciting that government expects unions to inform members in a mere space of twenty working days about their intentions not to pay the impending salary increase. In this regard, we hope that the Minister of Finance during his budget speech later today will not announce the freezing of public service wages. If he does announce wage freezing then we will be left with no option but to mobilise all our members and workers to shut down government indefinitely and render the system ungovernable. Moreover, we are more than capable of mobilising society at large for a mother of all fights.