On Tuesday hundreds of Kouga Municipality workers affiliated to SAMWU (South African Municipal Workers’ Union) went on strike for a second day after talks with the employer reached a deadlock.

The strikers are demanding that the contracts of 74 EPWP (Expanded Public Work Programme) workers, which terminated on 28 February, be extended.

Workers gathered at the municipal offices in Da Gama Street, Jeffreys Bay, holding placards and singing. The union said 400 workers were on strike but the municipality did not confirm this number. Kouga employs 1,000 municipal workers.

SAMWU representative for the Kouga Region, Clifton Booysen, said, “We held discussions with the municipality at the end of last year and reached an agreement that these workers would have their contracts extended for another period. This has been happening before, so nothing was strange … We were baffled to see that instead of extending their contracts, the municipality went ahead to employ about 48 new workers to replace these workers.”

He said there were also 24 workers who had been working as casuals for many years. “In our discussions with the municipality, we reached an agreement that they would be employed permanently,” he said.

However, Kouga Executive Mayor Elza Van Lingen said, “Every EPWP worker signed a contract in November last year that clearly stated that they would be employed from November to 28 February 2017.”

She said the EPWP “is not meant to create permanent employment, but is a short term job creation project that tries to bring food to the tables of many people.”

Van Lingen said, EPWP “is a rotational project that tries without any favour or corruption to accord every unemployed resident a chance to also work and improve their lives in that short period of time. We … have managed to create a comprehensive database of the unemployed in this municipality.”

Van Lingen said some of the 74 workers had already their contracts extended on several occasions.

“We need to give other unemployed residents a chance to work. We have a population of 113,000 people in the municipality with more than 30% of them not employed,” she said.

After gathering at the administrative offices, angry workers vented their frustration by spreading rubbish on the streets of Jeffreys Bay.

Van Lingen said rubbish was also strewn on the streets of Hankey, council property, including the entrance gate to the municipal building, was damaged in Jeffreys Bay , and human faeces was thrown at a building in Humansdorp.