The Gauteng department of health has a legal and moral obligation to act on the plight of 38 security officers facing dismissal for speaking out on their company’s failure to pay contributions to their pension fund.
The guards, employed by Calvin and Family Security Services, are stationed at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital. The company, owned by controversial Durban businessman Calvin Mojalefa Mathibeli, according to the DA, scored a R234m three-year tender to guard the hospital in Soweto.
But according to Salt, the administrator of the Private Security Sector Provident Fund, the company is currently non-compliant in terms of its statutory obligation to pay over provident fund contributions on behalf of its employees for multiple periods.
The administrator, who did not want to say how much the company owes in workers’ unpaid benefits, said the most recent payment received was on April 21 and only covered a portion of the total outstanding amount owed.
Despite denials to this newspaper by Mathibeli on his company’s debt, the fund said it received numerous queries from employees regarding their unpaid contributions. It said 135 determinations have been issued to date by the office of the Pension Funds Adjudicator against the company.
Not only is failure to pay workers’ contributions to the fund abhorrent given the owner’s known public profile of flaunting wealth, but it is also illegal in terms of the Pension Fund Act and labour laws.
Therefore, the awarding of tenders by a government department to a company that is non-compliant with the Private Security Sector Provident Fund is a betrayal of the workers. Any company that does not comply with the statutes in the country must not be awarded state contracts, and its owners must face prosecution for contravening the law.
The Gauteng department of health’s complicit silence in the matter involving Mathibeli’s company and the workers who are now being dismissed is alarming.
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority regularly provides details of private security companies and employers who are non-compliant.
The list is a useful checklist that ought to be used by the state to foster compliance when issuing tenders with public money. When workers are unable to claim their benefits after losing their employment, it is the state that they turn to again for help, thereby increasing the burden of the social security net while defaulting company owners continue to live large.
Time is now for the state to act in the best interest of vulnerable workers and taxpayers.
