Unlike those in the private sector, no employee within the state has suffered a loss of income.
The Democratic Alliance believes government employees have had a free ride while workers in the private sector have borne the full brunt of the financial impact of Covid-19. Dr Leon Schreiber, the DA spokesperson for public service and administration said in a recent statement that more than 3 million people in the private sector have already lost their jobs and a fifth of private-sector employees did not receive a salary in June as a result of the lockdown. Contrastingly, no person employed by the state has suffered a loss of income.
’’According to National Treasury, the average salary in the public service is R393 000 per annum or R32 750 per month. This means that, over the past four months of the lockdown crisis, the ANC has spent over R11 billion in taxpayer money to pay the salaries of at least 84 000 state employees who ’had their workloads reduced significantly,” said the spokesperson, adding that the party would be writing to Minister of Public Service and Administration Senzo Mchunu to find out why the government did not require ’’non-essential’’ public servants to claim from the UIF-TERS system in the same way it forced private employees to surrender their salaries.
’’To understand the full scale of the ANC’s determination to keep feeding its public sector patronage network, consider that the R11 billion wasted over the past four months on state employees who were not working is equivalent to 15.7 percent of the $4.3 billion that the government was recently forced to borrow from the IMF.”
