Membathisi Mdladlana, the Labour Minister, wants the ANC’s national general council in September to discuss radical changes to the labour laws that will see the introduction of employment equity targets or quotas.
Speaking to journalists a day before the release of the employment equity report this week, Mdladlana also revealed the government’s plans to get tough on non-compliance by fining companies up to 10% of their annual turnover. The maximum fine for non-compliance now is R900 000.
The minister also wants to change employment equity legislation to make it easier to prosecute companies that flout the law.
Sixteen years into democracy employers are still lagging behind, Mdladlana said. “People should be criminalised because they are breaking the law. The onus must be on the employer. It cannot be correct that we continue to give employers 60 days before we take action against them. If you don’t comply, we must give you the fine on the spot.”
Transformation in the workplace remains very slow, the 10th Commission of Employment Equity Report released on Thursday says.
The report shows that 10 years after the introduction of the Employment Equity Act, whites continue to dominate at nearly every occupational level, particularly at the middle to upper ones.
The report says white women still benefit the most from affirmative action measures, while people with disabilities and African and coloured women have benefited the least.
“Employers have a tendency to recruit and promote more males than females at their workplaces,” the report says. “The representation of the other designated groups at the various levels would have been much more equitable if employers had made a concerted effort to capitalise on recruitment and promotion opportunities by proportionally distributing them according to population size.”
Employers tend to provide whites at the higher levels with more training opportunities than other groups, the report says. “The disproportionate representation of training opportunities for the black group impacts negatively on employment equity,” it notes.
Employers are failing to hire enough people with disabilities, the report says. The initial deadline of 2005 to achieve a 2% representation of people with disabilities in the public service was shifted to 2010, but the figure is still well below 1%.