Varsities braced for salary hike
END OF OUTSOURCING ERA TO COST MILLIONS
AS THE era of outsourcing at the country’s universities comes to an end, their annual salary bills are expected to quadruple.
The University of Cape Town is bracing itself to spend an extra R58-million on salaries of currently outsourced general workers.
Like a number of institutions, UCT has been forced by rolling protests to abolish outsourcing.
A 2014 report on whether or not UCT should do away with outsourcing concluded that the cost of employing general workers directly would be R223-million.
This would be up from the R165-million the institution spent on outsourcing in the last financial year.
Noor Nieftagodien, a Wits University professor, said universities would fork out more money as they insource.
“At Wits we’re in the process of doing the calculations. The costs will likely increase across the universities, but vary from university to university.”
Nieftagodien is a member of Wits’ task team investigating details of insourcing.
The university agreed to abolish the practice during protest by students and workers late last year.
Nieftagodien said despite the costs, abolishing outsourcing was the moral thing to do. “It’s unconscionable of universities to employ workers in conditions that are like slave plantations, where workers earn low wages.”
UCT outsources five services. These are cleaning, security, catering, shuttle bus transport and landscaping.
It paid R40.7-million to cleaning company Supercare in 2014. The company supplied it with 417 cleaners, whom it paid R5 342 each month.
The company’s salary bill was R26.7-million per annum, meaning it pocketed over R13million. According to its website, Supercare has 4 000 contracts across the country.
But Supercare, where President Jacob Zuma ally Sandile Zungu is nonexecutive chairman, appears to have paid cleaners better than outsourced companies at other universities.
Cleaners at Wits University earned R2 700 from their outsourced employers.
#OutsourcingMustFall protests, which broke out late last year and are now raging in Pretoria, are fuelled by the belief that workers are receiving exceptionally low salaries from overpaid companies.
Mametlwe Sebei, one of the organisers of the protests that have rocked Pretoriabased universities and the City of Tshwane, said they were aiming to have money paid to companies redirected to workers.
“What you hear [from] workers are stories of long working hours and lack of benefits, amongst many things. All this indicates that workers are under a colonial labour regime, where companies come to plunder and to ruthlessly exploit our workers through low poverty wages,” Sebei said.
South Africa’s universities spend many millions of rands each year on outsourcing general labour.
Unisa, where workers and students are currently revolting against the practice, paid R105.4-million to contracted companies in the last financial year.
The University of Johannesburg spent R53.5-million on contracted cleaning and R39-million on security.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal paid R30.6million for contract cleaning and R35-million for security.
“Universities can’t employ workers as if they’re slaves