{"id":248822,"date":"2023-02-01T13:32:09","date_gmt":"2023-02-01T11:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-foreign-national-lecturers\/"},"modified":"2023-02-01T13:32:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T11:32:09","slug":"labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-immigrant-lecturers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-immigrant-lecturers\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour Court sets aside dismissal of immigrant lecturers"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Joseph%20Chirume\/port_elizabeth_tvet_college.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-immigrant-lecturers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Four lecturers at Port Elizabeth TVET College\u2019s Iqhayiya Campus were given less than a month to pack up their belongings. The Labour Court has temporarily overturned the college\u2019s decision. Photo: Joseph Chirume<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Labour Court in Gqeberha has granted an interdict setting aside the termination of employment of four lecturers at the Port Elizabeth TVET College\u2019s Iqhayiya Campus.<\/li>\n<li>Three of the lecturers are holders of the Zimbabwe Exemption Permit (ZEP) and one is Rwandan and has an asylum permit.<\/li>\n<li>They were informed in a letter on 12 January that their contracts would be terminated on 1 February.<\/li>\n<li>The Court has ordered the college to present reasons why the interdict should not be made final later this month.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Labour Court in Gqeberha has granted four lecturers, who are foreign nationals, an interdict to set aside their dismissals by the Port Elizabeth TVET College\u2019s Iqhayiya Campus.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-immigrant-lecturers.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>In the written ruling on Tuesday, the College was ordered to appear before the Court on 22 February \u201cto show cause why a final order should not be granted\u201d to compel the college to comply with the Labour Relations Act.<\/p>\n<p>The court granted the interdict pending the outcome of the hearing.<\/p>\n<p>GroundUp spoke to the lecturers on Monday before the ruling. Three are holders of the Zimbabwe Exemption Permit (ZEP) and one other is Rwandan and has an asylum permit. Three have been employed at the college since 2014 and one since 2015, in the civil engineering faculty. The lecturers have asked that their identities not be published.<\/p>\n<p>The lecturers were each sent a letter dated 12 January 2023 and signed by acting principal Jessie Figg and her deputy, D Baartzes, which stated, \u201cIt is with regret that we have to inform you that your employment with Port Elizabeth TVET College will be discontinued effective from 1 February 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The letter stated that their dismissal was in terms of legislation including the Public Service Act, the Department of Public Service and Administration Policy on the utilisation of foreign nationals; the Immigration Act; and the Critical Skills List Compliance gazetted in February 2022.<\/p>\n<p>The lecturers were instructed to return any property owned by the college without delay.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was shocked and taken aback,\u201d one of the lecturers told GroundUp. \u201cI only learnt about it when I was in Zimbabwe visiting my family during the festive season. I\u2019m the only breadwinner providing for many people who are desperate back home.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Human rights lawyer Simba Chitando said that the college had not followed proper procedure when dismissing the lecturers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis smacks of systematic institutional xenophobia targeting mostly Zimbabwean nationals in South Africa and is without doubt a gross human rights violation that deserves judicial scrutiny,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Sangolinye Ngqungwana, a lecturer at the same college and shop steward for the National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers (NUPSAW), accused the college of targeting immigrant lecturers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis incident is completely unlawful because these lecturers have been employed here for years. This is very xenophobic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Emails and WhatsApp messages sent by Groundup to the college\u2019s acting principal on 16 and 19 January, and again on Tuesday, 31 January after the ruling, all went unanswered. We also contacted the Department of Higher Education and Technology spokesperson, Ishmael Mnisi, who had not responded by the time of publication.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-immigrant-lecturers.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four lecturers at Port Elizabeth TVET College\u2019s Iqhayiya Campus were given less than a month to pack up their belongings. The Labour Court has temporarily overturned the college\u2019s decision. Photo: Joseph Chirume The Labour Court in Gqeberha has granted an interdict setting aside the termination of employment of four lecturers at the Port Elizabeth TVET [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":248823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-248822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/labour-court-sets-aside-dismissal-of-immigrant-lecturers.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}