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Clr Chikozho

Blessings Chidakwa Midlands Bureau
Gweru City Council employees have dismissed council’s job evaluation exercise, which seeks to identify workers for retrenchment, as “null and void”. The cash-strapped council is planning to lay off about 500 workers to reduce its wage bill, which gobbles about 63 percent of its revenue. The council was using the job evaluation exercise to identify excess human resources. The Gweru Council Workers Union last week accused their employer of being insensitive.

“The union wants to put it on record that in terms of the Labour Act their job evaluation exercise is null and void because when they engaged these employees in the first place, they were seeing value in them. We are opposed to this exercise which is aimed at cutting jobs when the economy is bad like this,” said the union in a statement.

The union urged workers not to partake in the exercise, which will result in some of them losing their jobs.

“As GCWU, we urge the employees to reject this and refuse to participate by not disclosing any information that those conducting this so-called evaluation exercise might require from them,” said the union.

The city mayor Councillor Charles Chikozho said the job evaluation exercise was being conducted by the administration. A council source who talked to The Herald said the evaluation report was almost complete and would be tabled before council soon.

“The report is almost already and very soon the 500 workers, which the council wants to lay off, will be contacted for contract termination arrangements,” said the source.

In 2015, Gweru City Council terminated the contracts of 100 employees.