White women and Indian people have benefited greatly from employment equity but there is little for black and coloured people to celebrate, according to Mpho Nkeli, the chairwoman of the Commission for Employment Equity (CEE).
The excuse given by companies that there were not enough skilled African men and women did not hold true, she said.
“Employment equity has worked. We have seen growth with Indian people at the workplace. We can see them at senior and top management level and we can say the same thing for white women,” said Nkeli.
Information presented in a CEE report shows an improvement of both white women and Indian people on workforce profile and movements at the top management level, with white women at 12.3%. In the top management level, the level of Indian males is at 5.4% and that of Indian women at 1.4%.
“To be realistic, for black and coloureds there is some movement. If you look 10 years back, we didn’t have black chief executive and now we have them. [But] the issue is not about the fact that we have them, the issue is about the pace of transformation, particularly for Africans and coloured people,” she said.
Employment equity was meant to achieve an equitable and diverse workforce, free from unfair discrimination. At the current pace of transformation, Nkeli said, “it will take over 100 years to transform the top management level and it will take us over 30 years to transform the senior management level in terms of Africans and coloureds”.
According to the CEE report, white males still dominate the workforce, with 73.1 % at the top management level, nearly six times their economically active population and nearly three times the cumulative sum of blacks combined at that level. Nkeli said there were a number of reasons for this.
“When we receive reports from employers, we don’t do qualitative research and analysis to explain why things are happening but we deal with statistics. But when we do director general reviews, we actually go to companies and start asking questions,” said Nkeli.
“Some of the excuses given by employers are that they can’t find black people, and then they say black people job hop,” she said. “What employers are saying is contradictory because universities have almost tripled their output of black graduates since 1994. The two don’t match.”
She said that the blanket statement that “all black skills are scarce” was not true because the level just below senior management was mostly dominated by black people. “Over 50 percept of people below senior management level are black. Employers should train them into the next level. That’s what companies can do,” said Nkeli.
“Employers say that blacks job hop, and this is also proven not to be true because when we look at the rate of job termination at senior and top management levels it is high for white people.” The commission did not see black people job-hopping.
More white people terminated their jobs and were also hired more often. “We are saying this should give us an opportunity that when they resign we grow black people into those positions,” Nkeli said.
According to the CEE report, workforce profiles and movement at the senior management level show that white males dominate recruitment levels (44.3%), top promotion levels (33.4%) and employment termination (46.2%).
Nkeli told the Mail & Guardian that boards had the power to change the pace of transformation and the profile of managing directors, and managing directors had the power to change the profile of senior and top managers. But things were not happening fast enough.
“Transformation is driven by captains of industry. Boards of companies are the ones that decide to appoint or not appoint managing directors and CEOs [chief executives] that are either white or black”. Nkeli said it was too harsh to say there was no transformation because some of the employers had changed. But she encouraged companies to push harder to increase the pace of transformation.
“Although some have changed, the overall aggregate is too slow. We want to hold the companies’ boards accountable for who they appoint as captains of industry,” said Nkeli. “The report is an annual event but the engagements on these issues are continuing,” she said.
Nkeli admitted there were elements in the Employment Equity Act that were almost impossible for the department of labour to implement and that made it difficult for the department to accelerate transformation. “The Act as it is is difficult to monitor and implement. It is difficult to take companies to the labour court if they don’t comply with the labour equity Act.”
But Nkeli was confident that an amendment to the Act would make it easier for the department to implement fines for noncompliance and employment equity could be a requirement for tender processes in terms of procurement.
“All the changes we are calling for in the amendment will make things easier for the department. “The process of amendment can actually take longer because of the consultative processes required by our Constitution, so South Africans need to be patient with the consultative process,” Nkeli said.
The amendment still had to go to the National Economic Development and Labour Council and was expected to reach Parliament next year, before being approved and enacted by the president. Nkeli said that black and coloured women were the worst off in terms of transformation in the workplace.
She said the same excuses given by employers for the slow pace of transformation in terms of race were also given for the lack of gender transformation — companies were saying they couldn’t find suitably qualified women.
According to the CEE report, at the senior management level African women represented 5.6%, followed by coloured women at 2.4%. “The Gender Commission has done some research on this and it shows that more women are applying for jobs but they can’t get those jobs,” Nkeli said.