Cape Town - SA Post Office (Sapo) staff took to the streets of Cape Town yesterday to call on the entity, National Treasury and the National Department of Communication to meet their demands and save the country’s deteriorating postal service or face a national shutdown.
Sapo is a loss-making enterprise, but in recent years its financial predicament reached critical levels with numerous post offices closing, retrenchments, salary cuts, no pay hikes for four years, failure to pay medical aid and pension fund contributions, slow uptake of technological advances in postal service, and many other challenges.
Post office employees who are members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) marched to Parliament to hand over a memorandum of demands to the government and Sapo management.
They said that if their demands weren’t met, the union planned to shut down post office branches across the country with support from its Cosatu, SACP and ANC allies.
CWU provincial secretary Wayne Bredenkamp said this march was of one many in the national Sapo shutdown organised by CWU this week to make clear that urgent action and government intervention were needed.
The demands include the resignation of Sapo CEO Nomkita Mona, the stopping of salary cuts, the payment of medical aid and pension fund contributions, and for the entity to adhere to the collective bargaining agreements relating to backpay (which they said has still not been paid since 2020) and the closing of offices.
Bredenkamp said: “This has been coming on for three years, our last resort is to have a strike.”
He said employees had to fork out their own money to buy paper, pens and even the bicycles postal workers used had to be repaired out of their own pockets. Bredenkamp added that wasteful expenditure and maladministration was largely to blame for Sapo’s current predicament.
At the march, Cosatu provincial secretary Malvern De Bruyn said CWU had Cosatu’s full support and that yesterday’s march was the start of a bigger campaign.
The march follows the death of a post office employee in Cape Town last week after his family struggled to get treatment at a private hospital when his medical aid was inaccessible as a result of Sapo not paying members’ medical aid contributions.
The deceased’s co-workers were at the march with a placard containing his funeral details and this message: “Post office failed to pay his medical aid. Rest In Peace.”
Sapo spokesperson Johan Kruger said: “CWU is an important partner in business for the post office, and the post office will go through the memorandum in detail and respond in due course.”
