Mindless employment equity on Meth

South Africans have become largely accustomed to politicians allowing the building in front of them to burn down rather than opening the gates for firefighters who might not conform to their specifications. 

For instance, with Joburg’s roads an unsightly quilt of potholes, largely presided over by unblinking ceremonial traffic lights, it is no surprise that mayor Dada Morero believes one of his most pressing tasks is to rename Sandton Drive after Palestinian activist Leila Khaled, whose claim to fame was that she was the first female hijacker, of TWA Flight 840 in 1969. 

It’s the same story with minister of employment and labour Nomakhosazana Meth, who seems to be spending every waking moment defending a series of new “employment equity” rules rather than, you know, dealing with the more pressing issue: unemployment, which spiked to 32.9% this week. Joblessness is now the burning building: of 41-million working-age South Africans, about 60% don’t have a job.

Yet Meth, rather than coming up with new strategies to actually tackle this crisis, is obsessing over what colour this ever-shrinking workforce should be. It’s paint by numbers while the landscape in front of you melts away.

On May 12, Meth published “numerical targets” to be imposed under an amendment to the Employment Equity Act, with the public given a month to comment. While the original legislation, first passed in 1998, gave companies the discretion to put in place a proper plan to “achieve reasonable progress towards employment equity”, Meth’s new “targets” aren’t just mind-numbingly confusing, they appear to be taking away any discretion companies had to come up with an equity plan.

The DA has taken Meth to court, arguing that these new rules are blatantly unconstitutional. In an affidavit, DA leader John Steenhuisen says Meth is imposing racial quotas “that employers must achieve, on pain of severe penalties”, including fines and the cancellation of state contracts. He says this is a “blunt and entirely disproportionate restitutionary scheme” that infringes the constitutional right to freedom of trade and occupation. 

“Whereas in the past, each designated employer’s employment equity plan would contain numerical goals appropriate for that employer’s situations, needs and the specific labour market faced by that employer, [now they] must adopt the one-size-fits-all target prescribed for that employer’s sector,” says Steenhuisen.

The outcome, Steenhuisen argues, is that companies have to re-engineer their workforce to achieve specific demographic targets, and if they don’t, the government can go to the Labour Court for an order forcing them to comply. 

In some instances, the formula appears ludicrous. In the waste management sector, for instance, the DA says it would appear that a company’s workforce must be exactly 79.3% Black, 9.2% Coloured, 2.7% Indian and 8% White. 

These numbers change in different provinces too. In Limpopo, the maximum percentage of Indian and Coloured people in the “public administration and defence” sector has to be 6.9%. And in Gauteng, Indian women can only make up a maximum of 2.6% of “financial and insurance” companies. 

More to the point, this new system of labyrinthine rules doesn’t even begin to address the real issue facing South Africa’s economy: parlous GDP growth that has fallen to less than 1% a year over a decade precisely because of dumb and unimplementable rules just like this that have chased away capital and killed jobs. 

GDP growth for real transformation

Don’t tell Meth, or her predecessors who drew up those rules, but the reason South Africa’s economy is in a bind, with one in three people without a job, isn’t because 79.3% of a specific company is not Black. It is because capital, like water, flows where there is least obstruction – and these new rules are plenty obstruction. 

If you want to see real transformation in our society, imagine what would happen if we had 5% GDP growth again. New companies would hire more people, and most of these new hires would be Black. Instead, it seems so small-minded that the government is grumbling over who must get fired. 

Which isn’t, of course, to say that transformation and employment equity isn’t necessary or vital; it’s just that if this is your only focus, and you want to achieve this by imposing rigid rules while ignoring the real problem, you’re failing to do your job and you’re a liability to the state.

It is instructive that Meth has reframed the DA’s objections as the party’s philosophical stance “against transformation”, a self-serving narrative which ignores the possibility that the DA may simply have taken issue with an exceedingly dumb and impractical set of rules that will only cause chaos for business. 

But perhaps that’s not altogether surprising. The closest Meth seems to have come to holding a real job outside of government, in the workplace she is now trying to overhaul, is rattling around several labour forums. In an insightful profile of her on the government website, curdling with sycophantic intent, we learn that “her determination to change the lives of ordinary citizens saw her bringing change by establishing partnerships in the health sector”.

You might be wondering where, in the hall of fame of modern-day commerce, the section is for people with the fuzzy qualification of “establishing partnerships in the health sector”, but I wouldn’t bother looking too hard.

There have been few more obvious examples of the maxim that politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. If President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to know why South Africa has yet to secure the “coalition dividend” he expected after the last election, when sentiment turned overwhelmingly positive towards the country, look no further than policies like this.