EEC WORKERS DOWN TOOLS ON THURSDAY

MBABANE – January appears to be a month of worry for government. While trying to get to grips with the proposed national strike action by public servants scheduled for January 28, government will now also have to deal with a looming industrial action by employees of the Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC).

Employees of the country’s power utility yesterday decided to down tools and march to their head office – Eluvatsini House - in Mbabane on Thursday to deliver a petition regarding their remuneration.

The decision was taken yesterday during a meeting held at the Bosco Skills Centre in Manzini under the employees’ union – the Swaziland Electricity Supply, Maintenance and Allied Workers Union (SESMAWU).

NO EMPLOYEES

As a result, it is expected that on the Thursday, there will be no employees at regional offices and service centres.
Should management fail to address the employees’ concerns to their satisfaction, they have resolved to then engage on a strike action and if this continues until January 28, they would join the public servants nationwide mass action.

Secretary General Maureen Nkambule said the employees were fed up hence they had decided to personally go to the head office to confront management regarding failure to give them what is due to them.

There are only two issues that the workers want addressed and these are the opening of negotiations regarding cost-of-living-adjustment (CoLA) and implementation of Circular No. 2 of 2016 which would result in salary alignment.

“With CoLA, we just want to be engaged in the negotiation table because this is being denied to us. Employees therefore want an explanation on why this platform is being denied.

The last time they engaged us was around November last year. Initially, management said they could not engage us because there was no Cabinet in place, so we gave them indulgence. Once Cabinet was in place we went back to management to raise the CoLA issue, but they told us that they could not negotiate without getting a mandate from Cabinet,” Nkambule said.

She said they were told that a request had been sent to Cabinet and they were still awaiting a response.
However, she said they doubted that there was ever such a request that was sent to Cabinet and they raised this concern during one of their meetings.

“We demanded that they show us the correspondence to Cabinet to prove if what they were saying was true and this caused havoc and we had to leave the meeting on sour terms. So we are still not sure if such a request was sent to Cabinet,” she said.
Regarding the salary alignment, Nkambule said management was not coming out clear why this was not being implemented.

“They keep telling us that the board approved the alignment but when we tell them to implement, they say there are some things they were still addressing. But we don’t know what it is that is being addressed.

They do not even want to give us the report as leaders of the workers union,” said the secretary general.
She added: “There will be no one in the offices. If we are not satisfied with the management’s response, the employees will not return to work and if this continues until the 28th, we will join the nationwide strike.”

Public servants are also demanding a CoLA adjustment, which they have not received in the past two financial years as government has maintained a zero per cent offer and cited lack of finances as the reason.

public sector associations

The public sector associations that will take part in the strike action include the National Public Service and Allied Workers Union, the Swaziland National Association of Teachers, the Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union and the Swaziland National Association of Government Accounting Personnel.
The associations said once the strike action kicked off, nothing would stop them unless government tabled a CoLA offer for them.

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