LETTER: EMPLOYMENT EQUITY LAWS COST JOBS
- BEE NEWS
- Apr 8
- 2 min read
Michael Bagraim | 7 April 2025
In a parliamentary questions session, I asked employment & labour minister Nomakhosazana Meth about the training and rollout of 10,000 inspectors who have just been employed, and why they were employed specifically to target employment equity wrongdoing.
Instead of answering the question directly, the minister accused me of being anti-transformation and of trying to undermine SA’s employment equity laws and regulations. I argue that our equity laws have been anything but transformational. Since the implementation and advent of employment equity our employment figures have gone from bad to worse.
The reality has to sink in that we have over 40% unemployment in SA. It cannot be business as usual. Employment equity is costing SA billions of rand every year, over and above employers’ desperate efforts to find ways to not create more jobs.
Every business has its own reasons for not hiring, but the common thread is a deep distrust when government tells them who to employ. Many of these are black-owned businesses and their reasons do not differ from employers in coloured, Indian and white race groups.
It is a disgrace that we still, in 2025, have so many race-based laws on our statute book. While most agree that we do need to rectify the wrongdoing of the past, the employment equity legislation has been shown to have failed.
The only way we are going to rectify the wrongs of the past is by ensuring that employers train and mentor as many of those who were previously disadvantaged as possible. The way to do this is through employer incentives, which could take the form of tax exemptions or a plethora of other beneficial arrangements, which would cost the fiscus far less than trying to implement and monitor the employment equity legislation.
Just one example of the cost of this monitoring is the training and employment of a further 10,000 inspectors by the department of employment & labour.
‘Disclaimer - The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the BEE CHAMBER’.