BL Premium reports that Eskom CEO André de Ruyter has dismissed the notion that the power utility has too many employees, saying that many staff members worked “extraordinary hours” to repair breakdowns.
Instead of focusing on decreasing the workforce, De Ruyter said there was a “desperate” need to fill the employee pipeline with new talent. “We need to train new people to take over [from an ageing workforce],” he said in his remarks at the Joburg Indaba mining conference in Johannesburg on Thursday. De Ruyter noted that critics of Eskom staff numbers often cited a 2016 World Bank report that said the power company was vastly overstaffed, which was one of the reasons for its financial troubles. At the time, the utility employed about 47,600 workers. Eskom cut employee numbers to about 42,700 (by March 2021), but this was still 30% more than it had 20 years ago. It advised in its integrated report for 2020/2021 that it was targeting a group headcount of 40,263 by the 2026 financial year to help “contain costs and build a more sustainable organisation”. De Ruyter defended the number of people employed at the utility and their right to fair wage increases. Earlier this year Eskom agreed to a 7% across-the-board pay rise for all employees covered in the central bargaining forum from July 2022 to June 2023. In 2021, Eskom unilaterally implemented a 1.5% pay increase, but the CCMA recently awarded employees a further 1.5%, backdated to July 2021. The utility’s employee costs for 2020/2021 were about R33bn (including remuneration and benefits paid to all employees) and the 7% increase awarded earlier this year added about R1bn to the wage bill.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Denene Erasmus at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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