As the City of Johannesburg’s new financial year kicks off, 1 600 security personnel were insourced.
MMC for Public and Safety, Michael Sun, MMC for Group Corporate and Shared Services, Ntombi Khumalo and Executive Mayor Herman Mashaba officially met and welcomed a few of these officers on 1 July. Joining them were members of the Economic Freedom Fighters who pushed to achieve the insourcing process.
“These 1 600 newly insourced workers, who reported for duty today, are the first of 4 000 security contract workers which the City plans to insource. The next phase of insourcing for the remaining workers will be implemented over the next two months,” Mashaba said.
The mayor added that the insourcing process was highly complex and remained one of the largest undertakings of its kind in local government. Despite the recruitment process being exclusively for security personnel who work for the City, more than 35 000 applications were received.
The remainder of the security force will be insourced in the next phase. Under the new system, the guards will receive an increased income, and will have access to medical aid, membership to a pension fund, subsidised education and subsidised housing.
Mashaba said during the process, efforts were allegedly made to sabotage the insourcing but were not successful.
“These efforts included companies firing security personnel and replacing [them] with family and friends to benefit from the insourcing process. Equally, these efforts included attempts within the City to bring into the process people who were not the intended beneficiaries.”
An independent auditing firm, Mashaba added, was brought in to audit the outcome of the process and validate it.
Despite the mayor’s statement that the African National Congress was opposed to insourcing, the party’s spokesperson Jolidee Matongo had previously told Randburg Sun that it supported the idea of insourcing. They were concerned, he said, about the way in which the process was started.
He was perturbed that at the end of the day, the 4 000 security guards would have to be retrenched because the City could not afford it.
Previously, the City outsourced its security services through more than 150 contracts with service providers paying on average R14 000 per security guard, while the guards themselves received as little as R4 000 as a basic salary per month.
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