With no money in the kitty to pay Tshwane metro workers of the electricity and water departments for overtime, the workers of these departments now refuse to work any further overtime.”By not paying the workers what is due to them, the metro is holding Pretoria residents ransom,” a very disgusted Ben Chapman, ward councillor for Murrayfield, said. He said the suburb had been plagued by power failures since the Easter weekend.A reliable informant told Rekord that more than 10 000 workers of the two departments have not yet received their overtime pay for May, despite repeated assurances by the metro that the back-pay earnings will be paid into their accounts.”Our trade unions, SAMWU and EMATU, held a meeting with the top brass of the metro about this. The decision was that none of the workers will work more than 40 hours normal overtime in a month. Most workers average about 80 hours overtime a month. Many of them even work 150 hours overtime. As to workers specializing in high voltage electrical work, the decision was that if something went wrong it would not be attended to until the full amount of overtime had been paid to the workers,” the informant told Rekord.Chapman said ”The same thing happened during the Easter weekend when large parts of Murrayfield was left without electricity. Homeowners phoned the electricity department and me, as their ward councillor, to complain about the electric power breakage then.’’”We were told there were no standby teams to fix the problem. I also sent a sms to two other people who were in charge of the electricity in this region and I also spoke to a lady. She told me the problem was caused by the metro not paying the electricity workers their overtime and they then refused to work any further overtime. This meant they only worked from 07:00 to 15:00. My concern was, and still is, this is the fourth biggest metro in SA and you cannot run a city of this magnitude from 07:00 to 15:00,” he said.Chapman also said electrical workers told him there was a big dispute about ‘normal overtime’ and ‘unplanned emergency overtime’. ”The workers can organise themselves to a certain degree to work normal overtime, but the metro is not providing money for emergency overtime,” he said.”The gist of the matter is the council is holding the whole city ransom should anything happen during the week after 15:00 till 07:00 the next morning. And should anything happen during the weekends on Friday after 15:00 it will have to stand over till Monday. So the past five days all emergency repairs was handled in a go-slow mode,” Chapman said.
