Madam Speaker/Chairperson

The grand toilet war of election 2011 has come and gone and here we are considering government service delivery again with the 2011 labour budget vote and business plan.

Treasury and cabinet have approved a larger budget for the Department of Labour (DoL) and, together with several virements in the last financial year, the department and its entities are receiving a slightly bigger slice of the pie than we had previously received.  As we approach the new financial year, the labour department has seen an unprecedented amount of change that has left its staff and entities reeling. We had the DG of labour suspended and sacked; we had the long-standing minister of labour sacked and the chairperson of the labour committee replaced also. We have welcomed our new labour minister, new labour committee chairperson and we hear rumours of a new DG about to be appointed. What we must assess is whether this department is running at full steam and whether it is delivering on its mandate for all South Africans. With 1 in every 4 South Africans now voting DA, we have a vested interest in seeing that it does run smoothly. Our 1 in 4 South Africans would expect us to look after their interests and do so we shall.  Incidentally, looking at the election results, if you add the total votes for the cities of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay and Pretoria, the ANC received 911006 votes, whilst the DA received 1053267 votes, so if Jimmy Manyi had managed to remove the oversupply of certain race groups to the Eastern Cape and Gauteng, he would have handed us another two metro cities! But I digress!

So let’s look at some of the Labour Department detail:

The Sheltered Employment Factories are in a terrible state. Their subsidies have been reduced and government departments no longer have to purchase from these factories. Without new markets for their products, they are slowly going down the financial drain and instead of providing more job opportunities for disabled citizens, a few thousand less people now work for the Sheltered Employment Factories than did in 1994. However there are plenty of ways for disabled people to be sought: The Compensation Fund deals daily with South Africans who have become permanently disabled and now cannot work. Why doesn’t the DoL hand their names over to the Sheltered Employment Factories instead of trying to run an employment agency of their own? We have military veterans from the liberation movements who also sit without work, and some are disabled. Silo thinking! Our 1 in 4 South Africans would expect us to demand better co-operation from government departments. Our people deserve better!

Moving skills development from the Department of Labour to the Department of  Higher Education (DHE) has been extremely messy and badly managed to the extent that the Auditor General cannot comment on the financials of Skills Fund. The DHE is, I am told, going to get a disclaimer as a result of the botched handover process. Proper governance criteria or accounting procedures were never adopted at the department of Origin -Labour Department - and have similarly not been set up in the DHE. What a mess! There are question marks over where the money went during the handover period. One version of the story circulating among departmental staff is that money is being run through the banking accounts of Minister Nzimande because too few bank accounts were opened timeously for the transfer! I hope that post-audit, these irregularities will be sorted out and the Department of Labour’s hand in this mess will be clarified. Where is Mr. Manyi when we need an explanation?

But there’s more: I have personally conducted visits, to offices of the Department of Labour in Pretoria, Johannesburg and elsewhere and discovered a whole range of  training staff sitting idle in government buidlings. Now before you laugh let me explain. They are what remains of the skills development staff of the Department of Labour. It seems that the former Minister, Mdladlana, transferred the budget for skills development and training to Higher Education as requested, but, without telling anyone, kept the staff going in office after office in the DoL. Unfortunately they no longer have a budget to enable them to pay for the training courses that they had been offering. Now they sit, side by side, watching soccer, or finding stapling work to do. Oops!

I now believe that Mr. Moratoba will be moving these staff into the new government employment agency. Except that we are still arguing in Nedlac over the content of the enabling legislation, so I suppose they will have to continue watching soccer for a while longer! Some stapling for you, minister? Unfortunately Minister, the 1 in 4 South Africans that we represent want us to do better. Some of that money is their tax money after all!

The Taining Lay-Off Programme has been an equal disaster. Under this programme, about 7500 workers have been re-trained. However, almost R3Billion was pumped into it! This huge fund is still sitting there while people in SA have no jobs! What a disaster for the government! Let’s be honest, it was a great idea in theory, but there was simply no execution. None of the Seta’s has yet been able to account for how much they spent on the Training Lay-Off scheme either. How much did they use? No one knows? How much per person? No-one knows that either. I only hope that the Auditor-General is taking note of this problem.  The DA’s 1 in 4 voters is certainly taking note.

 

The Essential Services Committee needs an urgent intervention also. It is essentially dysfunctional at present and has no real budget to run operations. It does have a General Minimum Services Agreement but this does not address the real concerns because it is too generic. It does not adequately clarify who may or may not go on strike and therefore, it is largely ignored by unions and employers alike. 1 in 4 of those South Africans now voting for the DA are affected by this chaotic situation and Minister we request urgent action to improve the operations and efficacy of the Essential Services Committee and a budget that will assist it to function. What can you do to improve this situation for the workers?

 

My colleague will be examining the Compensation Fund and the UIF this year, and I will not step on his toes, but I must just say that there has been no real improvement in payments of claims. I had one man in the Western Cape wait for a year and lodge enquiry after enquiry and appeal after appeal to get medical attention after a work injury. He also applied for compensation from, of all places, the Compensation Fund.  Months went by without a response. He lost his house and his car, and moved into a garage for which he was paying a small rental. He had an eye injury that needed urgent medical attention, which he did not receive, because it was not approved despite completing forms and handing in reports from medical examiners. I escalated his claim and the appeal. I then emailed the relevant officials again asking for help. He was then thrown out of the garage he was living in because he couldn’t pay the small rental. I finally received a call from the mother of his children telling me that this past Christmas he had committed suicide and asked whether there was any payment coming that could be used for his children. I almost wept and that story still haunts me 5 months later. His member of Parliament sits here today and quite frankly, I do not know what to say to her. Many people in South Africa are very, very poor and when they are injured at work, or can no longer work, we should be able to respond to their legitimate needs speedily. The current state of affairs is just not good enough. We are still shuffling 20 documents and forms for every single application for Compensation and a similar situation in the UIF department. Instead of spending all his time measuring racial quotas, Mr Manyi, as labour DG, should have been fixing the computer system and streamlining the funds to deliver for the poor!

 

I want to close by examining the textile industry and how the labour department, together with other departments, have contributed to the ruin of an industry. In Newcastle we had several factories making textiles and paying workers below the minimum wage. The Department of Labour applied the relevant legislation and shut those companies down and 15000 employees lost their jobs. Some of those companies relocated to Swaziland and Lesotho and the remainder of those unemployed workers eventually turned on their unions and the bargaining council and asked for the companies to be re-opened. Some were eventually re-opened and are still not able to pay those minimum wages. Absolutely nothing has been achieved in this process except the loss of Jobs.

 

I do not condone the payment of below minimum wages, however a better solution could have been found. What we need in this industry, among many other labour intensive industries, is a co-ordinated approach to all aspects of the industry and a government that can understand complex detail and tailor-make legislation, regulations and policing of the industry in a way that creates jobs first.

 

The DA calls on the Minister to implement a Cadette internship programme for the textile industry, which takes on apprentices at a lower wage while they are being trained for a year at least. We also call on the Minister to apply an exemption from the bargaining agreement for the Commission Embroidery Industry that has been wiped out because each business is too small to comply with the agreement and margins are too low.

 

I do not understand the rationale for small companies who’s staff are not unionized being forced to pay over levies to the bargaining council in lieu of union fees. That is yet another tax with no purpose. It’s like a punishment for no services rendered. I call too on the Minister to conduct joint operations with Customs and Excise as the DA is aware that customs officials find it difficult to distinguish textiles such as cotton, wool, silk and polyester from each other when they land at ports like Durban and allow the goods through with the wrong valuation and therefore the incorrect import duties and levies being applied. There is too a problem with new goods being allowed in as “second hand” and the officials are not averse to re-arranging the invoicing to suite, for a small fee. Bribes kill jobs! The reason that this is a labour issue is that for each shipment that comes in without paying the appropriate duties, jobs are lost and the margins in Newcastle get thinner and thinner. If we want decent work for textile workers, then we have to stop the cheating at the harbors and ports of entry! A cluster of measures like this will improve the financial position of our textile industry and push wages to an acceptable level.

 

In Closing, I understand that the new DG of labour is about to be appointed in the person of Mr. Nhleko and it is about time. I have, in a previous speech welcomed the new minister to her department. However I call on her now to urgently intervene as people are suffering, industries are suffering and many bargaining agreements have become very dated and out of touch with the reality on the ground.

 

Our 1 in 4 South Africans would demand that we push for a better deal. I now declare in this first speech after the general election, that the toilet war of 2011 is officially closed!

 

I thank you.