CAPE TOWN – President Cyril Ramaphosa hosted a Job Summit to “align the efforts of every sector and every stakeholder behind the imperative of job creation”.
The aim of the Summit was to identify solutions to job retention and deal with policy and regulatory uncertainty to unlock inclusive growth and employment.
A few days after the Job Summit, VBS Mutual Bank announced that more than 100 employees will be retrenched, “employees countrywide face possible retrenchment next month”, the bank said. VBS has branches in Thohoyandou, Sibasa, Louis Trichardt in Limpopo, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
According to media reports, the spokesperson of the office of the curator, Louise Brugman, has confirmed that only 26 employees will remain. The employees will get severance packages, three weeks’ salary and R5 000 for the repayment of their loans with the bank.
Brugman explains: “Yes I can confirm that there has been requirement to reduce staff at VBS Bank. This was announced to staff on the 13th of July already and the consultation process started on the 24th of August which included the unions and the non-unionised members. The CCMA was also involved and then this involved about 100 staff members and for the bank requirement of staff now is reduced to 26, so the impact of possible retrenchment is around a hundred people.”
“Fedusa is deeply disappointed that workers at VBS that hundreds of workers will be retrenched because the leadership of Bank stoked millions of rands. The workers are now being retrenched because of weak corporate governance and the federation calls on the police to prosecute the perpetrators so that they should spend many years in jail. For many years the police dealt with corporate crimes as white-collar crime. Fedusa say these corrupt executives should be jailed”, said Dennis George, Fedusa General Secretary.