Business and economic experts say plans to safeguard local jobs with potential foreign employment limits in some categories is a step in the right direction in the battle to reduce SA’s crippling unemployment numbers.
But they argue the government must use a nuanced approach to tackle the country's record unemployment of nearly 35% to ensure this does not feed into anti-immigrant sentiment.
Pan-African Investment & Research chief economist Iraj Abedian says it boils down to a “real case of competing moralities”, requiring a balancing act between trying to stabilise SA by providing jobs for desperate locals and “sympathetically dealing with the migrants from other African countries”, especially in cases where their home countries are in turmoil.
Cas Coovadia, CEO of Business Unity SA, says the organisation agrees that in a country with such high levels of unemployment, particularly of unskilled people, SA should “prioritise employing our own people”.
“But this isn’t just about what do we about skills and what do we about unemployment and what do we about foreign workers. This is also about how we control our borders, what sort of mechanisms we have in place and what policies we have in place that allow people into our country.
“Without first having the appropriate policy in place and the wherewithal to actually implement that and control our borders significantly better than we are controlling them now, we are not going to solve this problem.”
SA has a critical shortage of professionals for highly skilled jobs, for which foreign personnel are probably needed, while at the same time migrant workers are engaged in many unskilled or low-skilled jobs.
After its February 9 meeting, the cabinet said it had approved the launch of public consultations on the proposed draft national labour migration policy (NLMP) and Employment Services Amendment Bill (Esab).
Without first having the appropriate policy in place and the wherewithal to actually implement that and control our borders significantly better than we are controlling them now, we are not going to solve this problem
— Cas Coovadia, CEO of Business Unity SA
It said the policy aimed to provide a “balance between the protection of the employment of South Africans while taking into cognisance the economic skills required by the country”.
The cabinet’s statement said the NLMP would provide a framework and the legal basis to regulate the extent to which employers can employ foreign nationals while protecting the rights of migrants. “The policy provides the basis for the proposed Esab.”
The cabinet said the public consultation process would “afford citizens and relevant stakeholders the opportunity to make inputs into the NLMP”.
Asked what types of jobs could be affected, as well as the time frames for the process of public consultation, the department of employment & labour said it was “still in a process of gazetting and will communicate in due course”.
Referring to the cabinet’s plans, Abedian says: “It’s a balancing act, there is no winning situation. The enactment of this proposed legislation in and of itself is not going to lead to xenophobic or anti-migrant sentiments.”
The key is to have “political management of the situation”, particularly around the messaging.
“So if you say no foreigners in restaurants, it’s xenophobic. But if you say there must be a balance of no more than 30% or whatever the figure might be, that is reasonable, it then speaks to the application of the idea that charity starts at home, and communicating it that way,” Abedian says.
“We also have to reach out and help other African countries. But how long do we help other countries, when our pool of unemployed and poverty increases and then our own society becomes unstable?”
Abedian says the policy framework the government is suggesting is a step in the right direction. His preference would be to “open the process up and to have NGOs and human rights organisations and the media and others have a serious contribution as to what the balance must be”.
Typically the targets of these policies are sectors that either have low skill requirements or skills that entail “job specific training”, such as table waiting, where newcomers can get on-the-job training within a week, he says.
“The next layer could be the lower-skilled components of industries such as agriculture or warehousing.”
Coovadia says that in addition to the appropriate mechanism for border controls there is a need for “very clear and crisp policies” that “home affairs and others can actually implement and be held accountable for when they are implemented”.
“It’s not just a question of taking a decision on which jobs should be reserved for South African people and so on, it’s the whole architecture we need to look at.”
Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi says the process of driving the NLMP and Esab falls under the department of labour & employment and that
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