Durban - THE eThekwini Municipality’s Durban Solid Waste (DSW) Unit has only R18 million left in its overtime budget and is expected to run out of money in two months’ time.
This is according to the outgoing head of the unit Raymond Rampersad, who also revealed during an interview with The Mercury, that the unit spends R9 million every month on overtime.
Rampersad, who has resigned, will leave the post at the end of the month.
At the start of this financial year in July, the unit received R55m to cover the overtime budget for the year, but just three months into the financial year the budget is almost depleted. The unit’s original overtime budget was R110m, but this was cut in half following a directive by the council to reduce overtime costs to the current R55m. Officials in the unit have argued that the unit should not have been subjected to these cuts and should have been given more money.
They argue that this is based on the fact that in the 2020/21 financial year, it had a budget of R110m but exceeded this and spent R150m, R40m more than the budget.
DSW has also faced allegations of abuse of overtime following revelations
that people were claiming as much as 200 hours of overtime hours and tripling their salaries in the process.
The budget cuts have sparked protests by employees in various departments. The DSW staff were the first to embark on industrial action in August when the policy came into effect, they were followed by the electricity department and last week the water department followed suit.
“We are sticking to the hours that have been prescribed, but we will still run out of funds for overtime by the end of November,” said Rampersad.
“We have operations that are seven days a week, and we are spending around R9m on overtime pay each month, we are already above R32m spent to date,” he warned.
He said unless there were changes, services could grind to a halt. “We are supposed to be servicing customers, some of those who have paid for their services, but I fear that the cleaning of beaches, and servicing of businesses and hotels might all come to halt as I would have to tell my guys that they cannot work on weekends.”
He said in Phoenix and uMlazi, the unit was already having a difficult time cleaning those areas.
“Another challenge is that when the budget cuts policy was implemented, we were told that the money will go towards the hiring of more staff. To date, there has not been a single advert placed to attract employees for my unit,” he said.
IFP councillor Mdu Nkosi said the issue of overtime was a serious matter that needed to be looked into.
“We need to look whether there are employees out there who now live on overtime pay. There are also suspicions of fraud in that unit whereby people are not even ‘clocking’ when they come to work or when they leave work but they’re still claiming to have worked overtime. I still believe that if more people are hired, we would not have such a serious problem of overtime,” said Nkosi.
DA councillor Mzamo Billy said following the council resolution to cut overtime by 50%, the Human Settlement and Infrastructure committee “has not appraised us with an up-to-date report on the progress made in terms of any savings since then”.