The South African Minister of Employment and Labour apparently believes that it is the employers of foreigners in low-skilled jobs such as domestic work or the hospitality industry who are causing problems in the country, when they should be hiring local labour instead. He proposes harsh punitive measures, including a percentage of turnover as a penalty and added that legislation to achieve these goals – the Employment Services Amendment Bill – was nearing submission in Parliament. ‘We must go very hard’, he said, ‘or other people will hold us to account.’ Who could these ‘other people’ be, one wonders? This article is republished courtesy of the Daily Friend. – Sandra Laurence
Nxesi vows to penalise employers for hiring foreigners
Staff Writer
There should be stiff penalties for employers who persist in hiring foreigners to perform low-skilled work when South Africans are available to do so, according to the minister of Employment and Labour, Thulas Nxesi.
According to a report in Business Times, he said: ‘We have to be harsh on employers who employ these people. One of the things I want to propose is hard punitive measures for the employers who employ foreign labour when you have local labour, especially at a low-skilled level. They are the ones who are creating this problem.’
He proposed a percentage of turnover as a penalty. ‘We must go very hard’, he said, adding that this was a problem particularly in respect of agriculture, domestic work and hospitality, which did not require specialist skills. Employers were looking for low-cost workers.
He added that legislation to achieve these goals – the Employment Services Amendment Bill – was nearing its submission in Parliament.
Said the minister: ‘Our document is at a stage where there were comments and we are consolidating those comments together with the amendments that we have put in. Once we finish that, I suspect by October or November, we will be throwing it in Parliament. We have had almost 6,000 comments and we must take each and every comment into consideration, or other people will hold us to account.’
The minister has previously expressed the need to be ‘harsh’ on employers who fail make sufficient progress with regard to demographic representivity.
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