Johannesburg — GAUTENG teachers are to ask the Johannesburg Labour Court tomorrow to compel the provincial education department to repay "unlawful" deductions from their salaries relating to this year's month-long public service strike.

The Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysersuine (SAOU) had obtained two similar orders against the KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo education departments, SAOU Gauteng provincial secretary Chris Klopper said yesterday.

The union fears that because the deduction process has not begun in the other six provinces and the holiday season is approaching, the other provincial departments could begin docking teachers' pay at a time when it will be difficult to iron out problems.

The SAOU also wants the court to forbid the department from making further deductions this month and next.

"Teachers are paid on the last day of the month, so they will be paid for November on November 30, but for December they will be paid a few days after the schools close (on November 30) and as we all know SA comes to a standstill then," Klopper said.

"You can imagine the problems if there are mistakes made in that payment."

About 7000 Gauteng teachers claim the deductions are unlawful because they downed chalk for only one day during the strike -- on June 1 -- and the department has made deductions for other days.

Department spokeswoman Kate Bapela, who would not comment on the pending litigation, said teachers could rest assured they would be reimbursed if it was proved they had not been on strike on days for which their salaries had been docked, because the department had taken a policy decision to do this.

Klopper agreed that the department had undertaken to reimburse teachers whose salaries had been incorrectly docked, but this promise was made at the beginning of October and very few teachers had been repaid yet.

The union had given the department copies of schools' attendance registers and the department had acknowledged receiving them, but had still made the deductions.

Litigation was a last resort for the SAOU, which had tried to settle the matter amicably and presented the education department with a settlement proposal in mid-October.

"We wrote to the department's CEO (Mallele Petje) in September, but he did not want to settle out of court. He said that the department preferred to deal with the matter in terms of the strict legal procedure. That's when we approached the Labour Court," Klopper said.

Many teachers who had downed chalk for the one day that the SAOU joined the strike had had seven or more days' pay deducted.

"We even had a guy who didn't go on strike at all and had 13 days' pay deducted," he said.

Part of the agreement that ended the public service strike was that teachers would lose a maximum of four days' pay.