My Guys Are Going Hungry

One employer’s frustration is through the roof as he struggles without success to get Ters funding for his desperate workers

- Kim Abrahams

Over the past few months he’s had to answer difficult questions from desperate employees.

Why hasn’t the Unemployment Insurance Fund paid out my money? When will I ever receive a salary again? Donovan Potts, who owns a construction company in Cape Town, recounts one phone call in particular that broke his heart.

“A plasterer who works as a subcontractor for me asked me to please help him out with some cash,” Donovan says.

“He said he sleeps most of the time to avoid his hunger pains but when he wakes up his hunger is all he can think about.

“These people have nothing.” He’s always placed the needs of his employees first because he considers them family, Donovan says. Which is why it pains him that his workers haven’t received a cent for the past three months, despite him applying for the Unemployment Insurance Fund’s Temporary Employee Relief Scheme (Ters), which was set up to help workers whose jobs have been affected during the lockdown.

But Donovan has been struggling to receive payment from the start. Each time he called the department of labor’s office to enquire, he was told his claim was being processed and would be paid out within seven to 10 working days.

Yet nothing happened and he’s losing patience. It’s “blatant incompetence”, he says. “I’m not fighting for myself,” he says. “I’m fighting for my guys.”

He isn’t the only frustrated one. The department of labor has acknowledged more than one million workers haven’t received a cent from Ters since lockdown began in March.