A battle royal has erupted over Eskom’s alleged racially- motivated and unilateral transfer of its African employees to an outsourced private company.
This follows Eskom’s disposal of its corporate commercial services units, including its training colleges to its up-and-coming management entrepreneurs who wished to buy non-core business properties.
The in-house Eskom training colleges which employed almost 400 workers has been sold to a company in the auction bid which is reportedly linked to the former Eskom chairman Valli Moosa.
And, the mostly black employees in the college who were looking forward to be enlisted in Eskom’s ambitious career development programme have been denied that opportunity and were forcefully transferred and assigned work tasks in the private company. White employees, meanwhile who were employed in the same training colleges were exclusively considered for further career advancement and offered positions in other Eskom departments.
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) is peeved at the management “belligerency and myopic” approach of unilateral refusal to implement the agreed career advancement policy since last year in order to ensure that college workers who did not approve of transfers to private companies were further skilled to take up other challenging job opportunities in other departments. It is worrying to see management turning their back against workers who gave all to ensure the success of the colleges and racially discriminate them for no apparent reason while more job opportunities and further training is offered to everyone else in Eskom, Numsa chief shop steward in Eskom Nathaniel Goete said.
“We are gearing ourselves for adversarial and antagonistic engagement with Eskom management as we are mobilizing protest campaigns in conjunction with Cosatu to vent our anger against outsourcing,” he added.
Numsa has lodged a dispute with the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) for the right to go on a disruptive strike action.
For further information contact:
Mziwakhe Hlangani, Numsa national spokesperson
Cell phone: 082 9407116
E-mail : mziwakheh@numsa.org.za