Unpaid eThekwini plumbers vow to escalate protest
eThekwini plumbing contractors threaten to escalate protests and shut off water supply due to unpaid invoices dating back to October.
ETHEKWINI plumbing contractors have vowed to escalate their protest if the municipality does not pay their outstanding invoices and this could affects the City’s water supply.
According to the categories A, B, and C plumbers, they last received payment in October, which has put some of them in the red. “If they do not pay us, we will be turning the valves off. There will be no water in the City. We cannot keep working for free,” said one of the contractors.
This morning (January 26) they protested outside the Florence Mkhize Building where they demanded a meeting with management. “Every week it’s the same old story, empty promises and reassurances that we will be paid,” said one of the contractors who refused to be named out of fear of reprisal.
He said, “I nearly had my car repossessed because of being unable to pay my instalment. I had to choose between paying the workers’ salaries or my vehicle instalments, that is what eThekwini has reduced us to.”
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In the morning, the aggrieved plumbers met at the entrance of the finance department. They demanded that they be paid for work rendered to the City and that they uphold their end of the agreement. Speaking on behalf of the contractors, their representative said the City keeps shifting the goal posts in order to avoid making payments to the contractors.
“They still call us for jobs but do not pay us,” he said.
The representative said around 2000 contractors at five depots throughout eThekwini have been affected by the non-payment of invoices.
“Every time we enquire they tell us that the invoices were missing something and it’s apparently the words ‘plumbing services’, and prior to that it was a description of the work completed. We are tired of this back and forth and demand that the City pays,” said the representative.
In a meeting with eThekwini Water and Sanitation officials it was agreed that 152 invoices will be paid by the City. “That 152 is only a fraction of those that need to be paid. The backlog could be up to 600, meaning that in two months we will be back demanding payment,” said the representative.
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