GroundUp reports that queues form early outside the Department of Employment and Labour (DEL) offices at Middestad Mall in Bellville. The office opens at 7:30am and closes at 4pm, but there are people who still don’t get served even when they have arrived early in the morning.

At 8am last Wednesday, the queue outside was already long, with most people in it there to apply for their Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) money. They got up in the dark, spent money they can hardly afford on transport and wasted hours of their day waiting to be served. Many have to make several trips before they are either served or their UIF payment processed. There is no help desk, nobody to quickly check and vet forms so that people don’t wait for nothing, no effective queue management and no consideration for people who are elderly, pregnant or otherwise unable to stand outside. The clerks inside appear to be extremely slow, seemingly processing no more than 40 people a day. People in the queue indicated that about ten people had been let inside by 8am. They were the ones who had slept outside to be first. It was over an hour before more people were let in. Although officials give a cursory look at forms and give people a ticket number, there was no proper queue management and people complained about queue jumpers. At around 10am, a security guard informed everyone there would be load-shedding shortly.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Tariro Washinyira at GroundUp

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page