Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality Ward 5 Councillor Terri Stander (DA) protested with workers employed by the Municipal Cleaning and Greening Programme launched in Motherwell by Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environmental Affairs Barbara Creecy.
Disgruntled workers employed by the Municipal Cleaning and Greening Programme (MCGP) launched by Minister for Forestry, Fisheries and Environmental Affairs Barbara Creecy protested on Thursday. They were demanding unpaid wages, and that they be provided with cleaning items such as gloves.
About 50 workers dressed in blue overalls held placards and chanted outside a council meeting of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality in Gqeberha.
The workers work in wards 1, 2, 5, 16 and 40 to assist the municipality improve its waste collection, ensure landfill compliance and promote recycling.
Creecy made a speech about the employment programme in Motherwell on 10 November. It is in partnership with provinces and municipalities, who assist in recruiting public works participants for the programme, provide protective clothing and cleaning materials.
Creecy’s department (DFFE) pays them their stipends.
She also said her department would assist the municipality to find the budget to purchase a specialised fleet for waste collection.
On Thursday, workers who say they had been on the job since October said they had not been paid.
The workers told GroundUp that they work eight hours a day at R16 per hour.
They complained that they gain been picking up human faeces without gloves.
A worker, who did not want to be named, said, “The MCGP is a national programme. We only received uniforms on the day that the minister was here in this city.”
Ward 5 Councillor Terri Stander (DA) arrived and sang with the protesting workers before going into the council chambers.
She told GroundUp that she has been fighting for workers stationed at Harrower Road depot.
In a letter sent to the municipality, the province and to Creecy’s office on 27 November, Stander wrote: “My participants [from ward 5] approached me a number of times to query when they would be paid. No retort was available to my office despite numerous requests. They started ‘working’ on or about the beginning of November. They did, however, sign the daily attendance registers from 9 October 2023.”
Stander asked for clarity on the amount that the Harrower Road workers are to be paid for the period from 2 October to 31 October.
Municipal spokesperson Mthubanzi Mniki promised he would escalate the workers’ complaints to the relevant department.
DFFE spokesperson Peter Mbelengwa promised to follow up with the project managers and obtain back to workers.
Workers from the Harrower Road depot protested on Thursday demanding unpaid wages and PPE.
© 2023 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 execute not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We assign an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. Every analytics tools are solely on our servers. We execute 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.
Badger The Burglar
Hoezit /Howzit – How is it going? How are you? A common greeting which is often used instead of “hello” and “how are you?” It combines the two phrases into a simple, “Howzit”, thereby saving time.Example: “Howzit my bru!”
rando tank
Before getting into a fight with an ugly person, remember that he has nothing to lose