Pretoria - Field workers in the Pretoria area who were part of the 2022 Census are still waiting to be paid.
Their contracts with Statistics SA ended on April 14, but close to 100 of them told the Pretoria News they were yet to be paid their outstanding salaries for February, March and April.
Several workers representing the affected group said they had attempted to take their plight to the CCMA.
The workers said, however, that they were informed that each had to lodge a complaint, something they battled to do because they did not have the means to travel.
One of the field workers from Pretoria, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of victimisation, said although some workers had received their payments for some of the months, others were still waiting.
The field worker said even though she had started work in February and was paid for two months, she had been waiting for over a month for her last salary.
“I am studying, and I was hoping to use that money to pay off some of my modules, and now I can’t do that anymore.
“All the workers contributed R10 each for us to come to their offices and represent them as we have nothing.
“We've done our part and did the work we were supposed to do, so the least they (Stats SA) could do after we had to endure being attacked by criminals and almost being raped on a daily basis is to pay us our outstanding salaries.”
The fieldworker said comments from Stats SA about payments of workers being delayed as a result of incorrect banking details being supplied, or unfinished work, were not true as they were paid for the other months.
Another field worker, also from Pretoria, said he had used the initial salary he received to build a structure in order to start a small business in his area to sustain him at the end of the Census contract.
“It may not be much, but many of us had planned to use that money to set ourselves up long term, like booking to get our public driving permits, pay for courses or start businesses like myself.
“All that is falling behind due to incompetence of the Stats SA people.
“In my case, they claimed that even though I had signed my contract digitally, their system was corrupted so I needed to come in to sign it manually.
“But why were they not saying all of this before I came here today to find out what the delay was.”
Stats SA spokesperson Trevor Oosterwyk said that according to their records, the last payment run had been done last Friday, with the money expected to reflect either today or tomorrow at the latest.
Oosterwyk said as far as they knew, there were not many workers who were owed money, but they were unsure of exactly how many still needed to be paid.
“If they received one payment they will receive the rest of their monies in due time; they just need to be more patient, as these things do take time.”
Pretoria News