Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi has urged employers to disburse Covid-19 Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) funds paid to them by the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF).
This comes after the Minister received numerous complaints from workers who alleged that their employers had not paid them the money, even though their employers had been paid the TERS benefit.
The UIF TERS fund is intended to provide temporary relief for workers who are at home or to at least meet some of their salary requirements during the lockdown.
“To date, we have paid close to R9-billion in Covid-19 relief. This is the amount that we are paying for relief for workers and we appeal to the employers to ensure that it is paid to the workers without any further delay,” he says.
To ensure there is no delay in payments to workers, the UIF provides employers with the breakdown of how much each worker should be paid. This is after complaints surfaced that the lump sums were confusing employers.
“We took a decision to break down the payments, a decision that saw our systems almost overwhelmed with information as we did not want workers’ funds to be delayed even further,” notes Nxesi.
To date, the fund has paid about R8.83-billion to 114 661 employers, with the intention being to allocate funding to about 1.53-million workers.
An additional R152-million has also been paid out through 845 bargaining councils, thereby paying 56 456 workers.
The UIF has also paid about R1.29-billion in ordinary benefits.