Pensioners allowed back on Community Works Programme
Department of Co-operative Governance reverses decision to end contracts of about 35,000 employees who also get old age grants
Pensioner Sipho Festile from KwaNobuhle in Kariega is happy to be back at work on the Community Works Programme. His contract had been terminated because he gets an old age grant. Photo: Thamsanqa Mbovane
The Department of Co-operative Governance has gone back on a decision to end the contracts of about 35,000 Community Works Programme employees who are also getting old age grants.
Last month, the department announced that ââCWP workers who also receive old age grants would no longer be part of the programme, so that resources could be redirected to those who rely only on the CWP programme for a living. This followed an assessment conducted with the SA Social Security Agency (SASSA) which found that 35,000 workers were getting the grant and the stipend.
The workers clean government buildings and do other work, including refuse removal. They earn stipends ranging from R960 to R2,700.
âWe are happy to be back at work,â said pensioner Sipho Festile from KwaNobuhle in Kariega, Eastern Cape. He has been part of the programme since 2014.
âThis was not well thought out by the government,â he said.
In a circular dated 13 September, the department said that following âextensive engagementsâ it had decided to âwithhold the exiting of Community Works Programme (CWP) participants who are also beneficiaries of government âs old age pension until further noticeâ.
The department said this decision would allow it to engage with the CWP workers, in collaboration with the provinces, SASSA and other partners, to find ways to support them through the creation of cooperatives or small businesses.
Next: Death toll rises to seven after police swoop on informal gold miners
Previous: Live wires litter streets of Refilwe township in Tshwane
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.