The provincial education department could be in for a hefty bill of R500m if a new class action against it by disgruntled teachers succeeds.
Several teachers are asking the Grahamstown high court to certify a class action in terms of which they want the education department to refund them – and any other teacher that opts in to the class action – the difference in salary between what they would have been paid if they had been employed by the department and the comparatively meagre salaries they did receive from school governing bodies.
Over more than a decade, dozens of government schools were forced to fund out of their own pockets the filling of vacant teaching posts which the department failed to advertise or fill.
Most of the cash-strapped schools paid the teachers a lot less than they would have earned had the department appointed and paid them.
In 2015, a class action resulted in the department being ordered to refund some R100m to 122 of these schools that were forced to pay teachers who should have been in the employ of the department.
The court also ordered the department to permanently appoint these teachers.
Last week, seven teachers who had been employed by SGBs from schools in Port Elizabeth and Stutterheim asked that the court order the department to pay them the difference in earnings.
They want their salaries supplemented retrospectively plus 37%, which they say is the cash value the pension and medical aid benefits would have been.
They also want the court to certify an opt-in class action allowing other teachers in a similar position to join them.
This, says the department, could cost it up to R500m, which it does not have.
One of the teachers, Arthur Grootboom, says in court papers that he worked for Triomf Primary, a no-fee school in Port Elizabeth, in 2010 for just R10,000 a month instead of the R33,000 a month he would have been paid had the department employed him.
Over time, the SGB could afford even less and his monthly stipend was reduced to R7,000 and then R4,000 a month. The other six teachers had been similarly disadvantaged.
“The educators suffered these consequences as a direct result of the department’s failure to fulfil its constitutional obligation to appoint and pay teachers in substantive posts,” argued advocate Nasreen Rajab-Budlender. who was instructed by the Legal Resources Centre.
Judge Clive Plasket reserved judgment...