Question NW4030 to the Minister of Health
14 December 2023 - NW4030
Hlengwa, Ms MD to ask the Minister of Health
Whether his department has any records of the number of workdays that have been lost to his department due to (a) sick leave and (b) strike action from 1 January 2019 up to 31 December 2022; if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details?
Reply:
a) Public Services employees are entitled to 36 sick leave days over a 3-year cycle as part of their basic conditions of services. In addition, the Annual Report of the National Department of Health publishes leave usage statistics on a year-to-year basis. These leave days are captured on the Transversal system that is administrated by National Treasury (PERSAL). The statistics are as follows:
Year |
Total Sick Leave Days |
Number of Employees using Sick Leave |
Average Days per Employee |
2019 |
7578 |
984 |
8 |
2020 |
1036 |
339 |
3 |
2021 |
2374 |
425 |
6 |
2022 |
5924 |
796 |
7 |
b) The Labour Relations Act (LRA) defines a strike as “the partial or complete concreted refusal to work, or the retardation or obstruction of work, by persons who are or have been employed by the same Employer or by a different Employer, to remedy a grievance or resolve a dispute in respect of any matter of mutual interest between the Employer and Employees.
Furthermore, the section 64 of the LRA stipulates two procedural requirements that should be met for a strike action by employees to be protected and they are as follows: -
- Firstly, it requires that the issue in dispute should be referred for conciliation to a bargaining council or the CCMA.
- Secondly, If conciliation has failed or (thirty) 30 days period has lapsed from date in which the dispute was referred to the council or the CCMA. the employees in the private sector are required give the employer at least a 48 hours’ notice to embark on a strike, while the employees of the state required to give the state seven (7) days’ notice.
In the Department there was no strike action, rather there was a work stoppage due to non-compliance of the infrastructure/ building to Occupational Health Safety legislative framework.
END.