MBOMBELA – The local municipality was to implement amendments to the Labour Relations Act which came into effect on July 1, 2014. Some traffic officers say they are already in place.
According to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act an employee earning above the threshold of R205 433 per annum cannot be paid for overtime worked.
Employees working in the municipality’s community and technical services division, such as firefighters, traffic officers and electric technicians were excluded from the threshold regulations until recently.
For employees earning less than the threshold, overtime starts once ordinary hours of work have been completed. Firefighters and traffic officers work in shifts to ensure someone is on duty or standby 24/7.
A source said there was no way that anybody would be required to work for free. But a traffic officer said nobody wants to be compensated with time off, instead of money.
“They changed the policy but it was not communicated to us in writing. We don’t really know what is going on. But people don’t want to work for more vacation time. We get vacation time.”
Employees are unhappy about the loss of income. In October of last year, community services employees staged a protest over, among other things, what they considered their due in overtime payment. When some were suspended pending disciplinary investigations related to what Mbombela called “an unprotected strike”. Many bemoaned not working for about three months over their inability to earn overtime payment, something on which they had come to rely.
But overtime payments are a big expense for Mbombela. The mayor Cllr Sibusiso Mathonsi noted in his budget speech in May that inefficiency in the utilisation of employees, which resulted in MLM incurring above the norm overtime expenditure and contracted services, was one of the risks in the municipality’s budget identified by national treasury.
Yet Mbombela doesn’t seem to have a concrete plan to manage the change. A suggestion is that in exceptional cases where additional fire and traffic manpower is needed, employees who earn less than R205 433 work, instead of those above the threshold.
The municipal manager, Mr Noko Seanego did not answer any queries pertaining to MLM’s plan to manage a possible scenario where people work overtime and then have to take time off, possibly resulting in a staff shortage.
