Note to editors: The following speech was delivered in Parliament today by the DA’s Shadow Deputy Minister of Labour, Michael Bagraim MP, during the Budget Vote on Labour.
Chairperson,
The Department of Labour has as its primary responsibility two real issues. Firstly, to ensure that decent jobs are created and sustained, and secondly, that fairness, productivity and safety is ensured at the workplace.
Our Minister and in turn officials of the Department have surely failed.
We know and understand that 9 million South Africans who are looking for jobs cannot find them. We also understand that monthly, people are being retrenched as unemployment bites deep into our citizens.
Despite the horrific unemployment figures and 50% of our youth being unemployed, our Ministry sees fit, recklessly, to firmly place a National Minimum Wage on the table.
Our Treasury tells us that this will lead to further job losses.
The DA is calling for a sectoral minimum wage to ensure that we don’t have bloodshed in some of the sectors such as the clothing sector.
You, Minister, have stated “setting a national minimum wage only for the sector of the current workforce that is not covered by wage regulations and collective bargaining is not up for consideration at this stage”. It is pleasing to see that you use the words “at this stage”.
Minister, are you waiting for devastation at the workplace before you start considering? By then it might be too late.
I implore you to go back to the various bargaining councils and get feedback from their directors as to how the industry in that particular sector might suffer if a minimum wage is introduced.
Minister, you and I disagree heavily on the role and the need of labour brokers. Despite this, both you and I enjoy meals in this august institution prepared and served to us by labour brokers. We both enjoy neat and clean offices serviced by labour brokers. In fact, the majority of the work done in this house is through labour brokers. Indeed, one of the services which has been brought in-house is security. Unfortunately, when you bring these services in-house, we see how you are unable to step in as fair and reasonable employers.
There’s an ongoing issue between the security of this house and the institutions.
I have here today a large portion of our security personnel who are working hard under increasingly difficult circumstances who are being prejudiced because they are earning 20% less than the new so called white-shirts who are brought in specifically to eject the EFF.
The whole system is riddled with worms.
I specifically ask our unsung badly affected security personnel to stand so that I may introduce them to this house and to alert the house how they have been severely prejudiced. Indeed, we have just heard that Parliament has informed them that they will not be getting an increase due to various constraints.
Minister, you state “there is no conclusive evidence suggesting that the introduction of the national minimum wage will result in mass retrenchments in the businesses belonging to bargaining councils that may have already set minimum wages below the national minimum wage level”.
When you do have conclusive evidence, i.e. when there are mass retrenchments, don’t you think that will be too late? If we lose another two million jobs, we will probably have the worst nightmare you can imagine.
Minister, you state “we are aware of the risk of possible job losses”. If you are aware and you are wide awake, you would be very hesitant before you have an across the board tsunami. All I am asking is for you to consider more research, more input and maybe even a test run of the National Minimum Wage in parts of a particular industry.
Minister, you also state “to mitigate the risk… is the exemption provisions for those employers who have a sound business case”.
It is notorious that these exemption provisions that already exist in the various bargaining councils are almost impossible to obtain and incredibly onerous to complete.
Small businesses across the country are already suffering because they are unable to obtain these exemptions. We are all aware that small business is the engine room of job creation. However, Minister, you are doing everything in your power to halt their development. Small business has deemed labour laws and industrial regulations to be the handbrake on job creation.
The whole world is turning to a typical employment model but we in South Africa know better and would rather destroy job creation to pray at the foot of the idol of a trade union.
We already have a minimum wage in the various sectors which cover over fifty percent of our workforce.
This makes so much more sense as it is the role players who help determine what is sustainable for both employer and employee.