SADTU warns Treasury to stop using public wage bill to appease rating agencies and business

4 December 2019

The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), the largest union in the education and public service sector is sick and tired of Treasury’s attempts to run roughshod over public servants with threats of cutting the public service sector wage bill.

Addressing an investor conference in Cape Town earlier this week, Deputy Finance Minister David Masondo told the gathering that cutting the public sector wage bill was the most practical to address the state’s expenditure costs.

The issue of cutting public service wage bill has been bubbling under the surface since 2018. Many months later, we are yet to see the matter being tabled in the appropriate structure – the public service bargaining council. The Treasury’s tendency of publicly announcing matters without any prior engagement with critical stakeholders including labour shows total disregard for the institutions that have been established, through the blood and sweat of workers, to ensure labour peace.

This is clear sign that Treasury is intent on throwing public servants under the bus in its quest to appease the rating agencies and business. We won’t allow public servants to be used as scapegoats while elected politicians who are implicated daily in the Zondo Commission are not being called to account.

We demand that the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) send its team to the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC) to address these utterances as a matter of urgency.

We would again like to remind the Treasury that nothing will be achieved without us. We call on Treasury, for the sake of labour peace, to get off its high horse and engage with us in the structures that were established to deal with matters of conditions of service.

Issued by Nomusa Cembi, Media Officer, SADTU, 4 December 2019