swaziland times

BABANE – Civil servants have demanded a 7.27 per cent increase in the cost of living adjustment (CoLA), while the government is offering a 3 per cent adjustment across the board.

The demand was made at yesterday’s Joint Bargaining Forum (JNF), according to membership updates from four unions, with the Swaziland Public Sector Union (PSU) representing about 21,535 public service workers, while employers are represented by the Government Negotiating Team (GNT). The 7.27% demand is for the 2024/25 financial year. GNT’s CoLA offer is said to be retroactive to April 1, 2024.

Not allowed to join a trade union

Civil servants represented by state-owned enterprises are only a small fraction of the 42,686 public servants, with the remainder being employees who cannot join unions. They include senior government officials, politicians and members of the national security forces. In recent years, the Swaziland Principals Association (EPA), an organization of vice-chancellors and principals, has participated in parallel negotiations with state-owned enterprises on behalf of non-unionized civil servants. Meanwhile, yesterday, the National Party and the SOEs presented their respective position papers, with the latter demanding 7.27%. Their motivation for this demand was that the economy grew by 3.1% last year and inflation was 4.1%. The SOEs are: the National Public Service and Allied Union (NAPSAWU), the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT), the Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union (SWADNU) and the Swaziland National Association of Government Accounting Personnel (SNAGAP). They said this year, like every other, has been a difficult one for government workers as their pockets have been dented by rising prices of basic goods and services.

Adjustment

According to the unions, the adjustments received by public sector workers have in previous years been well below actual inflation. As a result, they say, workers’ wages continue to be eroded because of the low annual cost-of-living allowance provided by employers. “The continued increase in tariffs and other basic goods prices needed for survival have a severe impact on the general living conditions of workers as they live below the poverty line,” the union said. They said that as per the court order of July 6, 2016, the government should have implemented the wage review in 2021 but it has not been implemented till now, resulting in more losses for the workers. The unions justified this demand on the basis that as workers, they have always believed that the civil service plays an important role in the economic revitalization of the country, mainly because of the large number of people engaged in the civil service system.

For example, they say electricity prices have gone up 8% and water prices have also gone up. They say this results in nearly 75 per cent of low-income earners’ spending going towards daily expenses such as food, transport, rent, utilities and communications. “Unfortunately, these goods and services have seen significant price increases over the past two to three years. Public transport prices increased by 15% in 2022, water prices increased by 9% in the same year and by another 10.2% in the 2023/2024 fiscal year, and electricity prices recently increased by 8%,” the state-owned enterprise submitted its report. Therefore, the SOEs claimed that as major contributors to the economy, civil servants have noticed that the country is fast heading towards a period of stability as it has successfully navigated the COVID-19 era which, like other countries around the world, brought socio-economic turmoil to the economy.

Improve

They said the country’s economy has improved significantly since 2021, which is a good indicator that the country’s economy is stabilizing. The union said the Department of Economic Planning and Development, in its 2022 financial report, forecast that gross domestic product (GDP) would grow by about 4.5% in 2023. “In addition, the government received a healthy revenue of about €11.75 billion from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) in the 2023/24 financial year, which is expected to reach €13.06 billion in the 2024/25 financial year, which also shows that our employers have strong financial strength. “What this tells us is that the government is now in a better position to provide workers with an adequate cushion, allowing them to pump more money into the economy.”

In view of this, they have made demands, hoping that the government, as an employer, will acknowledge that workers’ wages have been severely reduced and that the salaries of civil servants can be appropriately adjusted. Unions say that as social partners, employers have an obligation to respect workers’ rights and value the efforts they make in their daily work. “Therefore, the minimum living allowance requirement proposed by state-owned enterprises is 7.27%. This is based on the addition of the inflation rate of 4.1% and GDP (economic growth rate of 3.1%) in 2023/2024.” State-owned enterprises submitted this data.

difficulty

They say employers have been paying very low cost-of-living adjustments, and even after the relief, public sector workers are still in serious financial hardship. State-owned enterprises claim that workers’ lives have not changed qualitatively. Unions say the 7.27% cost-of-living subsidy is enough to bring workers’ living standards to a level they can afford.
They say such rewards would allow workers to invest more money in the economy, thereby reviving it. The result, they said, would be generally positive growth for the country’s economy as a whole.

The unions said that giving public sector workers a percentage of GDP would go a long way in motivating them to do their daily work. They said that in the full spirit of good bargaining, they chose to be considerate and not add the differences from previous years to the current CoLA demand, despite the expectation that they would be added.