DA opposes labour broker legislation

Draft legislation now before Cabinet will make the labour department a massive labour broker and severely restrict the free market in employment, the Democratic Alliance says.

The draft Employment Services Bill was an ominous indication of an ANC shift towards implementing aspects of a planned economy, DA spokesman Ian Ollis said.

It would hamper job creation and represented another attempt to centralise control ahead of promoting entrepreneurship and investment.

"If this bill is passed into law, it will damage the jobs market and make it virtually impossible to hire workers on a temporary or contract basis in future."

The bill should be sent back to the labour department for a complete rewrite and certain key clauses needed to be removed as they were completely unworkable, Ollis said.

The bill made it the department's responsibility to provide public employment services free of charge in a manner that was open and accessible to members of the public.

"What the department conveniently omits to mention, is that it has already initiated a system that conducts this function, namely the Employment Services South Africa (ESSA) project, a grossly under-utilised system seldom used by the private sector as a preferred source to find work-seekers," he said.

Private employers would also have to report and notify the department of any new vacancies or new positions in their establishment within 14 working days after the position become vacant.

The bill then afforded the minister the power to prescribe how employers should notify the Public Employment Service of all vacancies, going so far as to detail a technocratic list of requirements the minister might impose on firms in this requirement.

An employer was given the extra administrative burden of having to provide written reasons within 14 days to the director general as to why any departmentally preferred candidate with the required profiles could not be appointed.

Along with this, the bill would effectively limit the functions of the crucial Temporary Employment Agencies (TEA) in South Africa.

The bill only recognised the service of recruiting work-seekers on behalf of another firm, and stated that no private employment agency could offer intermediary services to any employer without a lawful licence.

"The ANC's insistence on altering and meddling with a private sector system which works, and facilitates around two million jobs per annum, in a country where their other economic policies are not providing enough jobs, is concerning," Ollis said.

Taken together, these measures would turn the department into one massive labour broker and employment agency, and severely restrict the free market with regards to employment assistance in South Africa, he said.

"Why does government want to compete with private enterprise?" asked Ollis.

Government departments in South Africa were notoriously inefficient and the labour department was a prime example of poor service delivery.

The current employment assistance offered by the department was a case in point.

It came nowhere near to the efficiencies of the private sector and placed a far lower percentage of registered work seekers than most private agencies were able to, Ollis said.