NYS cooks unhappy over zero overtime

As part of saving costs, the National Youth Service (NYS) in December last year discontinued overtime for kitchen staff at the Rietfontein campus. However, this has not been well received by the cooks on the campus who want to be paid for their weekend's work.

Before December 2016, the kitchen staff at the NYS Rietfontein training centre used to claim overtime for working during weekends but now the situation has changed as Sundays and public holidays are considered as part of 'ordinary working days' as long as they do not exceed eight hours worked.

According to one of the cooks, who opted for anonymity, the entire groups feel overworked by their employer saying that they do not work only eight hours a day and added it is unfair to let someone work on a Sunday and not pay them their legal double-time dues.

“We feel like volunteers here. How you can expect someone to work abnormal and long hours and they cannot claim overtime?” the source asked.

He added they were only informed verbally that the system has changed this year and that there is no further payment of overtime.

“We did not sign any document agreeing that we will work for free and if they are talking about saving costs, they recently had a meeting here at Rietfontein and most of them were from Windhoek. Why did they not have the meeting there? They came all the way here simply to claim S&T because they will not come here for free like we are working for here,” the source remarked.

The source also said that currently there are only eight cooking staff who operate in groups of four per day shift, saying that the fact that overtime is removed is like an insult, because on a daily basis the four staff on duty are expected to cook for and serve the over 400 students enrolled, as well as clean up.

“This is too much work for us. All four of us have to cook, serve and clean up.”

Contacted for comment, NYS spokesperson, Johanna Kambala refuted the claims made by the cooking staff regarding the issue of overtime.

She confirmed that in the past the cooks used to work overtime but said this is not the case anymore as the NYS introduced new shifts in order to cut costs.

“NYS confirms that the cooks worked overtime in the past. However, this was discontinued with effect from 1 December 2016 due to budget cuts and as a result, new shifts were introduced,” Kambala said.

“The discontinuation of overtime was communicated to the kitchen staff through the relevant channels in an email dated 9 December 2016. Hence, the claim made by the staff members that the new arrangements were not communicated to them is a deviation from the truth,” Kambala further said.

Kambala said that under the new shifts the staff members work strictly eight hours per day which is different from the 07:00 to 18:00 claim made by the source.

She also said that in total the staff members under the new shift work a total of 126 hours per month which is far less than the 160 hours as prescribed by law.

Kambala said prior to Namibian Sun's enquiry they had received a letter of grievance from the cooking staff's union representative, Namibia Public Worker's Union (Napwu) over the overtime issue. She said they responded explaining the reasons why the overtime was cancelled.

“…as expected, the kitchen staff were supposed to receive this information from their representative,” Kambala said.

Kambala explained that the recent budget cuts negatively affected the operations of NYS and as a result management had to come up with measures to cut cost.

“NYS management had to come up with austerity measures to cut costs which will allow the service to carry out its mandate, that of empowering the Namibian youth through the provision of skills training,” Kambala said.

KENYA KAMBOWE