Fight the SA government’s obsession with race

The union won an Employment Equity court case against the Department of Correctional Services in which the Cape Town Labour Court ruled the department’s affirmative action policy was unfair insofar as it negatively affected coloured people in the Western Cape. Solidarity’s Dirk Hermann said the union would soon petition Parliament to ask for a debate on the issue. “We hope that we can have a kind of national Codesa on Affirmative Action. But it (must) start in Parliament. Hopefully in the beginning of next year we’ll see a Parliamentary debate. All the opposition parties support our cause.”
Johan Kruger, spokesperson for Solidarity, says the amendments to the EEA will empower the government to enforce the national racial demographics and to discount unique regional differences. ‘Section 42(2) and 42(3) of the amendment bill gives too much arbitrary power to the Minister of Labour. It will empower the minister to pass regulations that could force any designated employer to make his personnel corps a reflection of the national racial demographics on every job level and in every workplace. Solidarity is conducting various lawsuits against state institutions where this one-sided approach has already been put into practice by the government. The amendments are therefore nothing but an attempt to align legislation with the government’s proven obsession with race.’
Kruger says that instead of making the Act more flexible, the amendments do just the opposite. The current EEA requires a number of factors to be taken into account when an employer’s compliance with the Act is determined. ‘These factors include: the available pool of suitably qualified people; economic and financial factors; the sector in which the employer carries on business; the availability of vacant positions; and the staff turnover. Whereas the current Act determines that all these factors must be taken into account in order to determine if an employer complies with the Act, the status of the factors that have not been removed has been lowered and these factors will now only serve as guidelines. This amendment will therefore open the door for race-based employment formulas to be enforced with greater intensity.’