‘Cut wage bill at the top, not the workers at the bottom’
THE public sector wage bill has drawn criticism from opposition parties with Cosatu sticking to its guns that employees should not be held responsible for the tight fiscal space.
Cosatu’s parliamentary co-ordinator Matthew Parks told the joint committees on finance yesterday that the number of public sector workers had not increased significantly in the last 25 years of democracy.
While in 1994 there were one million public servants, this number was at 1.1 million today.
But DA MP Geordin Hill-Lewis said the wage bill was unsustainable.
The National Treasury has been trying over the last few years to cut it.
Finance Minister Tito Mboweni conceded in the Medium Term Budget
Policy Statement (MTBS) last week that there had been few people willing to take early retirement.
In the MTBS review it showed that the public sector wage bill would increase from R630billion in the current financial year to R717bn in the 2021/22 financial period.
Parks said the public service was not bloated, but was instead bloated at the top (executive). He said that in 1994 there were 34 million people and one million public servants.
However, today there were 57m people with 1.1 million public servants.
Hill-Lewis said the government should focus on the 29 000 people who earned above R1m a year.
He said the government would realise savings there. Some ANC MPs in Parliament this week defended public servants who earn more than R1m.
Hill-Lewis said the government needed to cut spending. “When you have a debt to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of 70% you have to get public expenditure under control. Ours is not under control. The solution is to cut waste in the public sector,” he said.
Parks, meanwhile, maintained that Cosatu agreed that the government must cut public servants wages at the top.
Mboweni last week said that they could not get many people to take early retirement. He said only 4000 people had done so. This was a far cry from their target of close to 30 000 public servants.
Parks said there was no need to target low-income workers. He said there were still vacancies in critical areas in health and the police.
■ Police Minister Bheki Cele had previously said there was a shortage of 10 000 police officers.
Mboweni had also said that when he met ministers they often complain about budget cuts and a shortage of staff.
But the government implemented the freezing of posts a few years ago as part of cost-containment measures.