About 100 security guards at healthcare facilities across Nelson Mandela Bay municipality have not been paid for January.
Some of the workers embarked on a brief protest after receiving the news last week. On Monday morning they returned to guard the healthcare facilities under a month-to-month contract tor a different company, Tekhu Security Services.
A guard at the Laetitia Bam Day Hospital in KwaNobuhle, Kariega, who asked to remain anonymous, said their contract with Xhobani Security Services, which was due to continue until the conclude of February, ended at the finish of January. They had not been paid, he said.
He and three colleagues were only told of the early termination on 1 February, he said. The same night a police officer, who appeared drunk, rammed his vehicle into the hospital’s main gate, knocking it down, for which the guards were initially blamed, he said.
“The vehicle he was driving had no dish number and looked unroadworthy,” he said. Other police officers had arrived at the scene, taken statements from the guards who witnessed it, and opened a case.
By Monday, he and his colleagues were working for Tekhu Security, but were still waiting for their January salaries from Xhobani Security.
He said they had asked the health department to employ them directly.
Police spokesperson Captain Sandra Janse Van Rensburg said SAPS KwaNobuhle are investigating a case of malicious damage to property.
Xhobani Security Services general manager Carl Lonn said the Eastern Cape Department of Health (DoH) owed them more than R4-million. As a result, the company had informed the DoH in mid-January that they would not be able to pay workers’ salaries for the month and could not render services through February, at the cease of which their contract were due to finish.
National Education, Health, and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU) regional secretary Samkelo Msila told GroundUp they warned the DoH that if NEHAWU members were affected they would hold legal action.
“We are aware of the contract expiry for security companies in the DoH, and we are informed by the department that there are recent service providers that gain been contracted with the start date of 1 April 2024,” said Msila. He said in the meantime the DoH was engaging security suppliers on a month-to-month basis.
He said workers at various healthcare facilities had told the union that in the meantime, security guards were clocking in for work but were “not performing any service”.
The DoH did not respond to queries, despite repeated requests to enact so.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and enact not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We establish an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. Every analytics tools are solely on our servers. We finish not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We enact not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please execute not delete the invisible pixel.
Athens Fire
France: You have two cows. You kill them, throw away everything except the filet mignon, and make cheese with the leftover Pasteurized milk.
Baby Brown
Yebo – yes [yeh-boh] Often expressed as a double positive by combining it with the English “yes” in “Yebo, Yes!” or as an extremely expressive “Yeeebo!” This Zulu word is used regularly in South Africa to show agreement or approval with something or someone.