4 planned changes that every South African business should know about
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Lawmakers are currently considering a number of draft pieces of legislation which are likely to have a direct impact on South African workers.
The draft laws cover a range of issues including BEE, the wage gap, and the hiring of foreign workers. All of these proposals are set to be discussed further, or even implemented, sometime in 2021.
BEE and transformation
Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Employment and Labour published the Employment Equity Amendment Bill for public comment in December 2020.
The bill will empower the Employment and Labour minister to regulate the setting of sector-specific employment equity targets across most of South Africa’s major industries.
Bourgeois blues
But fiscal austerity may make it poorer
T
HE HEADY years after apartheid gave rise to what advertisers and the press called “black diamonds”. Portrayals of newly rich black South Africans were often crass, highlighting their flashy cars and fancy homes that had been out of reach in the era of white rule. Many of the gaudiest examples involved people close to the ruling African National Congress (
ANC). In 2010 Kenny Kunene, a businessman and convicted fraudster who later starred in “So What: Big Money, Big Dreams”, a
TV show, was criticised for spending 700,000 rand (then worth $47,000) on a party where he ate sushi off scantily clad women. His response: “It cost more than that.”
In celebration of the Basotho hat
In an emerging economy like South Africa’s, human capital development is central to the survival and growth of the economy. The economic system that is conducted in South Africa is a market-driven capitalistic one, whose focus is on maintaining a sound financial system that is globally competitive.
The historical context of South Africa remains a silent discourse that is relegated to a few concerned stakeholders in society. As clearly stated by the World Bank, South Africa is the most unequal society in the world with an increasing Gini coefficient (income inequality) quotient. The inherited economic system from 1994 has entrenched a few players in most sectors, known as oligopolists, controlling the market and in some cases manipulating pricing, as found by the Competition Commission with respect to the commercial banks having manipulated the rand, among other colluding challenges in the economy.
Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) members gathered outside Gauteng Premier David Makhuraâs offices in October this year to complain about the lack of socio-economic transformation in the country and the continued neglect of former liberation combatants. Picture: Itumeleng English/African News Agency(ANA)
Transformation is not just a numbers game
By Opinion
By Hadebe Hadebe
One of the biggest, and perhaps the saddest, misconceptions in the post-1994 discourses is the belief that transformation is only about numbers and black faces in the top echelons of an organisation. And it is therefore quite common to hear people get praises for being the first black or first female in a position.