Ten years ago, the forerunner of the official opposition Democratic Alliance had argued that the Labour Relations Bill should be amended to allow exemptions for small business from industry-wide collective bargaining agreements — and now the government is moving in this direction, says official opposition leader Tony Leon.
Speaking on Tuesday in the debate on President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation speech delivered on Friday, Leon said: ”I stood in this House [the National Assembly] and argued that the Labour Relations Bill should be amended … We were told by the government that such exemptions were impossible — that they were conservative and reactionary.
”Now, however, the president agrees with us. In an interview on television this past Sunday, he said that the need for exemptions for small business was ‘obvious”’.
Leon argued that there are ”many other such examples of DA [previously the Democratic Party] warnings that have proved correct”.
The DA leader said that in 2000, he had travelled to neighbouring Zimbabwe to meet with members of the opposition.
”When I returned, I met with our own Minister of Foreign Affairs [Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma] and insisted that President Robert Mugabe was not merely seizing farms, but destroying democracy in his country.
”Now, on the eve of next month’s parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe, President Mugabe is refusing to meet SADC [Southern African Development Community] leaders.
”Cosatu [Congress of South African Trade Unions] delegations and international observers are being turned away at the border. It is clear that democracy and human rights, not land, are at the core of the crisis in Zimbabwe.
”Five years ago, I cautioned the president that HIV infections and Aids deaths would continue to rise if he did not change his denial stance and begin an immediate roll-out of anti-retroviral drugs.
”He again refused. And, tragically, the death toll has continued to mount. At least 1,5-million South Africans have already died of Aids, according to the government’s own estimates — which may be deliberately under-reporting Aids deaths.
”When the government announced its plans for racial ‘transformation’ in the public service, the DA warned that many of the best public servants would leave and that the poor would suffer from poor service delivery.
”Today, the government is spending R600-million to hire back many of the same teachers in maths and science that it retrenched in the late 1990s at a cost of more than R1-billion.
”And the Minister of Defence [Mosiuoa Lekota] is complaining that only 144 out of 4 200 new recruits to the SANDF [South African National Defence Force] are white.
”Perhaps if we had listened a few years ago, we would have saved jobs and learnt more,” Leon said. — I-Net Bridge