UIF: MOA signed to pay bus sector workers

THE South African Road Passenger Bargaining Council (Sarpbac) has signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Unemployment Insurance Fund to facilitate UIF payment to employees in the bus sector during lockdown period.

According to Sarpbac general secretary Gary Wilson, bus companies had to submit claims to council on behalf of employees, then Sarpbac collated and consolidated the claims for submission to UIF.

Wilson said the unemployment fund would in turn pay the cumulative amount to Sarpbac for disbursement to various bus companies, making the process less cumbersome.

“Sarpbac will also be responsible for tidying up any loose ends including returning any unclaimed amounts to the fund.”

He said Sarpbac had also requested the labour department to extend the process to non-parties, and said they wanted to ensure they assisted as many bus companies as possible with funding to pay workers their salaries.

Wilson said the deadline for the councils to send in their applications for funding was yesterday.

“The UIF will pay the money into a special council account set up for this purpose.

“As soon as the money is received, we will distribute to the respective companies to pay their staff,” he said.

“We have since Tuesday received a huge number of requests from companies all over South Africa for financial support to pay salaries which we are busy consolidating.

“We submitted our first request for funding yesterday to the UIF which we will pay out as soon as we receive it,” he said.

He hoped this would alleviate the plight of workers in the industry.