/ 23 October 2014

DA at one with unions over jobs

Queuing for work: The unions and the DA are critical of the state's public and community works programmes.
Queuing for work: The unions and the DA are critical of the state's public and community works programmes.

Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene envisages spending R410-billion over the next three years on social grants, but the Democratic Alliance warns that the government is creating a culture of dependency.

Presenting his medium-term budget on Wednesday, Nene said he would not “balance the budget on the backs of the poor”, and would cut spending by, among other measures, freezing government personnel budgets and capping spending on consultants.

According to the department of social development budget vote, there are now more than 16-million grant beneficiaries, up from about 7.9-million in 2003. Nene proposed that the budget in February next year would continue to focus on the social wage, which includes social grants, skills development and job creation.

But the DA and trade union federation Cosatu criticised the social works programmes, which they said did not create permanent employment.

Of the R500-billion allocated to social protection over the next three years, social grants are expected to reach 17.3-million people and will account for nearly 85% of this spending. In 2012-2013, the government spent more than R100-billion in cash grants to support more than 15-million South Africans.

But the DA spokesperson on social development, Patricia Kopane, said social grants were “not a solution”. She said Nene had admitted the economy was not growing and could not sustain paying grants in the long-term. South Africans instead needed permanent jobs.

Kopane also criticised Nene for not mentioning small businesses in his speech. She said small businesses were the only way to alleviate poverty in the short term because many unskilled workers would be employed. “These grants create a dependency problem. The government is dispensing some kind of patronage,” she said.

Stabilisation expected
A treasury official told the Mail & Guardian on Wednesday that spending on social grants was expected to decline as a share of GDP over the next three years. The official said he expected more people to apply for child and old-age grants in the short term, but the figure would stabilise in the coming decade, according to actuarial population forecasts.

The grant amount given to a child is now R310 a month.

Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven said the a minimum wage and a comprehensive social security system were “not just necessary from a humanitarian point of view, but a vital means to empower our poorest citizens, make them economic role-players and taxpayers”.

The treasury official said six million short- to medium-term jobs would be created by the expanded public works programme and community works programme. The treasury has proposed that R3-billion be set aside for the community programme and R262-million for the public works programme for 2014 and 2015.

The DA finance spokesperson, Dion George, said both programmes were “quick fixes” as people were only employed for two or three months. He said people should be employed, but rejected the notion of short-term employment because it did not help to break the cycle of poverty. “In this instance we agree with the unions. We would want to make these [jobs] sustainable,” George said. He also said Nene should have focused on providing incentives for small businesses.

Cosatu and its affiliates said the programmes resulted in the “exploitation” of vulnerable workers by the government. The federation’s North West provincial secretary, Solly Phatoe, referring to the works programmes, said: “Those are job opportunities, not permanent jobs. The workers are not protected and sometimes they work three to six months without pay.”