[E]mployment opportunities are accessible to people only where they live. The objective of the EE Act is not to induce racial migrations to accommodate the statistics. Its objective is accessibility of employment opportunities and it achieves that objective only if it takes account where applicants for the posts are located. Statistics that serve as a tool for that purpose will be statistics that reflect the reality of the population, and the reality is that the races are not distributed uniformly throughout the country, which is not reflected in the Department’s Plan.
The Employment Equity Act has since been changed and it no longer requires an employer to take into account regional demographics when devising EEP targets – it merely allows it to do so if it wishes. It may be that this amendment is unconstitutional because it effectively encourages migration of people far away from their families and communities, thus containing echoes of the apartheid migrant labour system. But a future judgment will have to determine whether this is so.
via feedly.com
So sayeth Pierre de Vos in another of his insightful posts. As those who are scholars of Rob's Folly also known as Bolshie Bob's Botched Borscht will know that our Stalinist deludinist has found it fit to include the economically active population (EAP) as a target for his racially representative nation. As we have come to expect from the brains trust at the iDioTIc, the document is big on ideology and short on the most basic clue as to how to implement it.
The ConCourt has come to our aid when it comes to regional and national EAP. You can use both. The ConCourt referred specifically to an EE plan. But I feel confident that we can extrapolate this conclusion into the meat of any BEE scorecard scenario. But you have to read this plan into the IMF's David Lipton's recent speech on the state of the South African economy.
But there is something else going on that has developed with the evolution of the economy. This involves issues that I know are very familiar to you: infrastructure bottlenecks; skills mismatches in the work force; regulations that stifle competition and entrepreneurship and keep that one-third of the labor force unemployed or too discouraged to seek work.
The end result is that a huge part of the labor force is left on the outside looking in, undereducated and with no opportunities for advancement. I’m told, for example, that there are township youth who not only cannot find work, but who grow up without knowing anyone in their circle of family and friends with a job either!
The formal economy is not absorbing them, nor are they able to strike out on their own. There is a crucial structural issue at play here: those included and successful in the advanced economy — large businesses, banks and unionized workers — maintain entry barriers against their potential competitors — small and medium-sized enterprises and the unemployed.
These paragraphs actually refer to the 79% of the EAP that the Prison's Department wants in its employ. Lipton is telling us that the government has in effect let these people down, both through their historical neglect and their ongoing burdensome policies. And once they have washed their hands of these people by pushing them out the school system the private sector is expected to absorb them and make up their educational shortfall by blowing humongous amounts of cash on skilling them, 6% of payroll to be precise.
We are being taken for fools, policies created by buffoons who are not required to understand how an economy or a spaza shop runs. This doesn't specifically mean that we can point fingers at Zoomer and his band of incompetents. We are part of the solution but government needs to make the first move - and that move should be axing Zoomer and his cabinet without a pension.
And no, I don't feel better for writing this.
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