Why municipal workers are striking
2011-08-15 17:31
-
Biting at the Grave
This is not only a heartfelt narrative but a sustained exercise of moral and political intelligence.
Now R343.95
buy now
Cape Town - Raymond Daniels has been a refuse collector in Cape Town for 26 years.
“You see those three towers,” he says pointing to the Disa Park buildings bursting out of Devil’s Peak, “I work there, in Tamboerskloof, Woodstock… all along the Atlantic.”
The leafy upper middle-class suburbs in which Daniels works in is a far cry from his Cape Flats neighbourhood of Bonteheuwel, one of the poorest parts of Cape Town.
Daniels, 46, supports five children and a wife who is unable to work because she is chronically ill with throat cancer. He earns little more than R4 000 a month.
“They wanted to cut her,” he says, thrusting a finger into his own throat to show where doctors wanted to operate on his wife.
He says that he has medical aid and that his wife, Diane, is getting private care but “it is too little”.
Wage gap
This is why Daniels and thousands of other municipal workers around the country are striking for higher wages and they say that the SA Local Government Association’s offer of 6% is too low and are demanding an 18% pay hike.
According to the SA Municipal Workers’ Union memorandum to the City of Cape Town, municipal managers earn “in excess” of R1m per year, which works out to about R83 500 per month while the lowest paid municipal workers earn R4 339 each month.
“The municipal manager of Cape Town earns 29 times more than that of the lowest paid worker in the City of Cape Town and this is replicated in all other municipalities,” Samwu says.
A maintenance worker that News24 spoke to, who wished to remain anonymous, said that with the approximately R4 000 that she’s left with after deductions, she has to support 21 people, including her husband who has been unable to find work, her two children and her mother.
She also sends money home to her family in the Eastern Cape.
Double digits
Nigel Paulse, who does water works for the city, wants to know how the government can afford to “give” R2.4bn to Swaziland but can’t give its workers a living wage.
Paulse has four children and a wife who also cannot find work. He says that he earns “too much” to qualify for an RDP house but cannot get a home loan from the bank because he earns too little.
He now sleeps in one bedroom with his wife and children in his father-in-law’s house. He says that his sister-in-law also lives in the same house.
The union handed its memorandum over to the city’s Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson on Monday afternoon.
They promised that they would resume their strike on Tuesday. The union said that while it is willing to come down from its 18% demand, it won’t accept less than a double digit percentage figure.