Staff, students protest to end UJ outsourcing
THERE IS no end in sight to the protest by workers and students at University of Johannesburg who are demanding that the institution scraps outsourcing.
This is despite the university having said that it would do away with outsourcing and also establishing a task team to look into how insourcing can be phased in.
However, yesterday a group of about 100 workers and students gathered outside UJ ’ s Kingsway Campus in Auckland Park demanding that the university say when insourcing would be implemented.
The protest at UJ started last week with workers and students demanding that the university do away with outsourcing.
The university applied for a court order and 141 students and workers were arrested on Friday but the charges were dropped on Monday.
Student Representative Council secretarygeneral Mmangaliso Mkhonto said the protest would continue until the university told workers when insourcing would start.
Mkhonto said workers and students were not interested in the task team that has been established and that the only thing they want to know are dates.
“If they don ’ t give us time frames we will protest until they do,” said Mkhonto.
UJ ’ s deputy vice-chancellor for strategic services, Mpho Letlape, said the university has established the task team that would look at insourcing last month.
Letlape said the team would present a road map in February. She added that it would not be wise for the university to announce dates without a proper analysis.
“We need to do market salary surveys, for example, to see how much cleaners are paid ... We don ’ t want to falter when we start because that will create more problems than we have,” said Letlape.
She said the university had agreed to the demands and “we have no idea why they are protesting ”.
Letlape said the university has about 700 outsourced workers. She said it was only a small group that was protesting and some of them had returned to work yesterday.
Meanwhile, exams were continuing without disruption at UJ.