Popcru to march for better wages
The march will start at Church Square Central Pretoria and proceed to the Union Buildings.
The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) is planning a march to the Union Buildings on September 20 after it has rejected a 2% wage increase offer.
“Our members are struggling to get by and the government is not doing enough to meet the needs of law enforcement workers,” said Popcru spokesperson Richard Mamabolo.
The union is dissatisfied with the current wage negotiations and blames issues in different departments over the years for the problems in law enforcement.
It is said that workers have not received an increase since 2020 and are currently demanding a wage increase of 10% to counter the rising inflation costs.
The decision to reject the offer was taken during the union’s special national executive committee meeting last month, saying that the employer is “not coming to the table”.
“Members within the criminal justice are spending about 90% of their salaries on basic needs. This is while they do not qualify for RDP houses and cannot afford bonded houses. All these challenges they face while the government has been refusing to implement the government employee housing scheme,” says Mamabolo.
The march is set to start at Church Square in central Pretoria and then proceed to the Union Buildings. The union is said to have over 120 000 members nationwide.
The union’s other demands include the absorption of private prisons, nationalisation of traffic, reversal of budget cuts, additional prisons built to deal with overcrowding and a sufficient budget for uniforms among others.
“In the past three years, prices of goods and services have skyrocketed. It has become clear that workers are no longer able to cope, while the employer is busy coercing unions to sign. As a union, we have a mandate and responsibility to implement what our members mandated us, and we will stick to this mandate,” continued Mamabolo.
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