The labour department is determined to meet the jobs challenge, despite battles over strategy, Sipho Pityana tells Madeleine Wackernagel
On a hot Friday afternoon in Pretoria most civil servants would be itching to escape for the weekend, but not Sipho Pityana. Cool in his air-conditioned office, the director general of labour was in no hurry to quit his post; work was very much on his mind.
Pityana has been in the news of late due to his well-publicised spat with the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) but he was quick to play down the quarrel.
We musnt see Nedlac as a nuisance, because it isnt. The problem is with the procedures or lack thereof. Were having a management meeting soon to work out ways to strengthen the system.
There is no protocol in place that sets out standards of behaviour. And this laissez-faire approach is costing us time. We have a programme we have to stick to, as set out by President [Nelson] Mandela at the opening of Parliament. We cant have a situation where the president has to eat humble pie and say sorry, the Department of Labour didnt deliver!
Nedlac can and does work, as shown by the negotiations over the Labour Relations Act. The parties may not have agreed on everything, but now at least they own the law. We had hoped the same would happen with the Basic Conditions of Employment Bill; it would be sad if we lost that input. But to the extent that Nedlac could be seen as a barrier to governments ability to deliver, we would have a very serious problem.
Pityanas headaches are not yet over next on the agenda, after the Employment Bill is taken to Parliament, is the Skills Development Bill. At the same time, the social partners are gearing up for the Presidential Jobs Summit, now scheduled for early next year.
Prevailing economic conditions are not conducive to significant job creation: tight monetary policy means interest rates are too high to encourage expansion by industry. At the same time, South Africa is stuck with the apartheid legacy of capital- intensive methods of production. And while the labour force remains poorly skilled, that situation is unlikely to change in a hurry. Not that Pityana is advocating a Luddite attitude: We cant be anti- technology; it is not always feasible to replace technology with human capital.
But public works programmes are just short- term interventions. What we need is a structural realignment of the economy to ensure job creation is sustainable in the long term. We also need to accept the limitations of government. It doesnt create jobs but provides the leverage.
Part of that leverage is skills development. Training is often seen as an avoidable cost. But you cant just take someone out the mines and put them into tourism.
The Skills Development Bill has already raised hackles among the business community with its plans for a training levy, but Pityana is confident they will see reason. Those companies that have training schemes dont have a problem with it but the ones that have been piggy-backing on them, getting skilled staff without paying up, theyre not happy.
A levy system would provide an incentive to employers: they only get the money back if they are training.
A national skills authority is planned, with representatives from business, labour and government, which would disburse monies from the central fund. Given the problems with career information, its first task is to analyse across the board where skills are most lacking and then set out to match the training demands with supply.
Time is of the essence. If all goes according to plan, the Bill could be passed in the first parliamentary session of next year, with the fund in place by 1999 or the year 2000.
But we cant afford to wait until then to start training so we are looking to kick- start the whole process with a special budget. Weve already got the commitment from major donors.
His next big challenge is to get the social partners to agree on a comprehensive strategy to take to the jobs summit. The going wont be easy: Well probably hear a lot of arguments around the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, labour-market practices and productivity, but its appropriate to let all the parties air their views. The important thing is to develop a practical policy that will get the country back to work, says Pityana.
The political stakes are high: There is likely to be more synchronisation between the alliance partners on this than on other policies. But we have to be careful, to make sure the strategy is viable.
There is more likely to be agreement on short- and medium-term programmes than on long-term policy but the debate will continue long after the summit. You cant expect total agreement, but some is better than nothing.