Gail Alexan­der

Thou­sands of jobs at the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) may be in jeop­ardy next year since the 2021 Bud­get doc­u­ments show that WASA’s per­son­nel ex­pen­di­ture for next year has been cut to half of the 2020 fig­ure, says the Na­tion­al Union of Gov­ern­ment and Fed­er­at­ed Work­ers.

NUFGW’s web­site post­ed the com­ment yes­ter­day by NUGFW’s Ger­ry Kan­galee.

This fol­lowed Bud­get 2021 state­ments by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert on WASA in­di­cat­ing that a re­view of the pub­lic util­i­ty is be­ing cur­rent­ly done and a re­port on the re­view will be com­plet­ed next month.

De­ci­sions are ex­pect­ed on WASA’s fu­ture there­after.

Kan­galee said while on­ly eight lines were de­vot­ed to WASA in the Bud­get speech, “The dev­il is in the de­tails.”

Kan­ga­loo not­ed that a 2021 Bud­get doc­u­ment on draft es­ti­mates of ex­pen­di­ture and rev­enue for WASA in 2019 and 2020 al­so had es­ti­mat­ed ex­pen­di­ture for 2021.

“Per­son­nel ex­pen­di­ture for 2019 was $976.1 mil­lion, re­vised ex­pen­di­ture es­ti­mate for 2020 was $755.5 mil­lion and es­ti­mate for 2021 is $378 mil­lion. This means there is a pro­ject­ed de­crease in per­son­nel ex­pen­di­ture from the 2020 fig­ure and per­son­nel ex­pen­di­ture for 2021 is be­ing slashed in half,” he said.

Kan­galee added, “WASA em­ploys ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,100 per­ma­nent, tem­po­rary and so-called con­tract work­ers.”

“If per­son­nel costs are to be re­duced by 50 per cent it’s on­ly log­i­cal to con­clude that the work­force will be re­duced by a sim­i­lar mar­gin.”

He stat­ed that WASA man­age­ment has told Par­lia­ment’s Pub­lic Ac­counts team that WASA is over­staffed by 2,000 work­ers.

Kan­galee said Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC) chair­man James Lee Young al­so told a Par­lia­ment joint se­lect team in March 2018 that WASA has a poor rat­ing for ef­fi­cien­cy and al­so claimed WASA had 12-13 em­ploy­ees per thou­sand con­nec­tion while oth­er com­pa­nies have three to four.

Kan­galee said, “This is a clear sign that when WASA ap­plies for its rate in­crease ahead the RIC’s ma­jor con­sid­er­a­tion is go­ing to be how many work­ers per con­nec­tion does WASA have.”

NUGFW stat­ed while the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter has de­nied there will be mas­sive WASA re­trench­ment, the union was con­cerned the work­force would be “dec­i­mat­ed.