Employees at the National Housing Enterprise are scheduled to vote on whether to strike or not tomorrow, after negotiations with management reached a deadlock.
The Secretary General of Namibia Public Service Union, Matheus Haakuria says negotiating teams had initially agreed on a once off payment of N$15 000 for each employee.
However, he says the company allegedly reversed its decision, which forced the employees to reduce the amount to N$10 000.
Haakuria says the NHE board still refuses.
"The board indicated that it will only consider this payment once the NHE has provided audited financial statements for the financial year 2021/2022. Our information is that the audited reports for 2019, 2020 and 2021 are still outstanding. So how do you start auditing 2022? This means that workers will have to wait for all these audits to be done before their demands can be considered. PSUN believes that the NHE board is punishing the workers in the bargaining unit instead of acting against incompetent management unable to produce audited financial timeously as required by the law."
PSUN says the workers have no other choice but to go on strike to force the NHE board and management to do the right thing.
Voting will take place on Friday across all NHE branches.
Employees at Namibia Wildlife Resorts are also complaining of unfair labour practices at the state-owned enterprise.
In June 2020, NAPWU and NWR signed an MoU that allowed NWR not to pay overtime to its employees as a cost-saving measure until 31 October 2020. This MoU was extended again by NAPWU and NWR from 1 November to 31 October 2021. Employees were compensated through an arrangement called Time Off in Lieu, basically, they are given time off for the hours worked instead of a monetary reward.
Haakuria said even though the MoU to not pay workers overtime expired more than two years ago, NWR failed to honour its obligations.
"On 24 May 2022, NWR issued an internal staff notice in which it undertook to commence overtime payments as of 1 November 2022. As I am addressing you now, NWR has not paid a single penny in overtime monies to any employee. They failed to honour their own internal notice issued in May and worse, section 17 of the Labour Act. NWR last honoured the provisions of the labour act regarding overtime in June 2020.
PSUN says their members have therefore decided not to perform any overtime work unless they are paid accordingly for November and December 2022.