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Johannesburg - The reversal of the large-scale outsourcing of campus jobs at South African universities in the late 1990s is back on the agenda after large sections of the student movement this week cut deals to demobilise and write exams.
As with the 0% fee increase, the universities will be asking government to carry some of the costs and an announcement on how this will work will be made by the department of higher education this month.
Instant wage increases of about 85% will result if, for instance, the University of Cape Town (UCT) follows through on its new “in principle” support for “insourcing”.
The above-average minimum wages the university makes its subcontractors pay to campus staff is about R5 018 a month. The normal minimum wage for workers in these job categories is closer to R3 000 a month before deductions.
An internal study from last year indicated that this would be at least R9 000 if the workers were formal UCT employees in the second-lowest pay grade.
The study’s recommendations had been rubbished by the UCT council only a year ago.
In the wake of #FeesMustFall, however, UCT vice-chancellor Max Price announced on Wednesday that the university council had decided to “shift our previous approach to outsourcing”.
By Thursday, Price announced an agreement with union Nehawu to insource all the contracts that are reaching their end. Those contracts that have a few years to go will be kept if they have to, but the wages paid by contractors will be raised to UCT levels, reads the agreement.
University of the Witwatersrand vice-chancellor Adam Habib made a similar announcement on Monday, but made a less firm commitment to establish a commission to investigate the cost of insourcing as well as “alternative models”.
Speaking to students at Wits’ Senate House (renamed Solomon House by students) later in the day, Habib said that there “is some debate about who is an outsourced worker and who is not”, and that there was also the complication of long-term contracts as opposed to ones that are nearing their end.
These two universities, and possibly others, will do their own insourcing research parallel to a presidential commission looking at the same questions
The commission is one of the outcomes announced by President Jacob Zuma after the march on the Union Buildings last Friday.
The outsourcing of support staff at universities across South Africa was a major controversy in the late 1990s and has caused several waves of protests in the past. It was a prime example of the extensive labour restructuring that occurred throughout the economy after new labour laws came into effect with the new democracy.
UCT’s outsourcing of cleaning, security, landscaping and catering jobs ended up in the Constitutional Court in 2002. The same process at Wits and the University of Pretoria also went to the labour court – largely due to Nehawu’s failed attempts to keep workers’ wages and conditions intact.
What wasn’t said
Price’s announcement mentioned UCT’s report on insourcing from last year, but omitted some of its major findings and recommendations.
The report was written by UCT professors Johann Maree and Rochelle Le Roux.
One of their recommendations had been that the gap between Price’s R2.8 million salary and the wage of the lowest-paid UCT worker was reduced 25 times. For outsourced workers, the gap between them and Price is 46 times, they noted.
The professors had ultimately recommended that the outsourced workers remain outsourced, but that UCT intervene to raise their wages “over a five-year period” to the equivalent that they would receive if they were directly employed. This way, the arguments about outsourcing’s alleged efficiency is taken seriously, but without the accompanying wage suppression.
The costing exercise attached to the recommendations concluded that it would cost the university R223 million a year to do what the contractors do for R165 million.
That is R58 million extra, of which R45 million would be due to paying higher wages.
There would be an extra upfront cost of R68 million to set up the needed infrastructure and buy equipment, said the report.
But almost all of that relates to the hypothetical option of buying out Cape Town’s Jammie Shuttle bus service, which would mean R50 million for buses.
Most of the extra labour costs would have been due to taking over guards from security company G4S and cleaners from contractor Supercare, which also services Wits and Tshwane University of Technology.
Maree and Le Roux calculated that the extra cost of insourcing workers would amount to an extra 6% fee increase at UCT.
