COSATU statement on Standard Bank’s plans to retrench 500 workers

The Congress of South African Trade Unions is deeply concerned to hear that a possible 500 Standard Bank employees are facing retrenchments by the bank. The bank is arguing that this is happening as a result of the concluded revamping of their IT system.

While the bank has argued that most of the affected permanent staff held executive and managerial positions, this is still a big problem for a country with an unemployment record of 27, 5%. South Africa cannot afford to lose even a single job and 500 jobs is jobs slaughter

It is clear that with arrival of the fourth industrial resolution, there will be a lot of skills instability across many job categories. What is deeply worrying is that businesses are not taking an active role in supporting their current workforces through retraining and also government is not creating an enabling environment to assist these efforts.

This massive dislocation of jobs is going to continue into the near future and our government needs to wake up. It is very disturbing to witness their unpreparedness and overall indifference to the impact this will have on the lives of many workers and their families.

The failure by government to do more to force big business to adopt a moratorium on retrenchments during the recently held jobs summit was a big mistake.

COSATU has been calling for a moratorium on retrenchments and also for retrenchments with a human face, where people are properly eased out of employment with some semblance of dignity, including re-skilling the workers.

Despite many firms receiving tax credits for training they are not interested in re-skilling workers. It is for this reason that we are calling for the Department of Labour to amend Section 189 and the Labour Relations in general in order to require all retrenchments to be referred to CCMA for approval than merely notification and consultation.

The current law is very generous to firms or capital because for example re-skilling of workers is optional. We need to change our labour and tax laws in order to address negative effects of technology on labour and on consumers.

Issued by Sizwe Pamla, National Spokesperson, COSATU, 15 November 2018