The 24th Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) annual report came out recently, drawing some media attention. This is such an important issue, justice in labour, that more should be said.
First, there is a matter of principle. The CEE theory of labour relations considers any deviation from background population racial ratios as unjust “dominance”, as does the Department of Labour that the CEE advises.
For example, the CEE report states that the black “African and Coloured male representation is dominant in both Provincial and Local Government” at senior management level.
The CEE report also states that construction and transport sectors are “dominated by [black] African males” at the semi-skilled level.
That is offensive to common sense. A meritocratically selected senior management team, or a construction crew, that is 50% black male is not “dominated” by black males just because that group is 43% of the background population.
If a minority staff member complained that they felt “dominated” by their managers simply because half of them belong to some gender-race pair, then the complaint would be dismissed as absurd by any reasonable person, as it should.
At work we are aligned, so to speak, by the colour of the jersey of our team, not our skin, whatever the races involved. A “dominant” boss harmfully puts himself before the team, splitting the team by action, never just by being from one race or another.
In other words, you cannot reasonably say “my boss dominated me” just because she is of a different race, but the CEE says that about the labour market repeatedly.
There was a time when talk about racial domination was more serious. The most important speech in South African history includes the line, “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination” in pursuit of the “ideal” of “equal opportunities”.
During apartheid, unequal opportunities were entrenched by a plethora of mostly racist white male bosses and laws, to block the rest. The struggle for equal opportunities continues.
Morally empty
Admittedly, “dominant” is used in morally empty ways as well when talking about people, such as when commentators say, for example, that “the Springboks have the most dominant scrum in the world”. Still, that “dominant” relationship is fundamentally combative.
Now the same word, “dominant”, is used by the CEE to describe any case where 50% of a work level is black-female, or black-male, or coloured-female, or coloured-male, or Indian-female, or Indian-male, or white-female, or white-male, as if such an outcome is automatically neo-apartheid just because all of those race-gender pairs are less than 50% of the population.
This is not just about semantics.
Here is a Constitutional Court citation of an “employment equity plan” of the kind the CEE abides by at the Department of Correctional Services: “At level 3 only Whites and Indians should be appointed.”
Why was the government prohibited from hiring black and coloured senior managers at this level? Because black and coloured people were “dominant”, on the CEE’s way of using the term.
This racial exclusion was applied at different levels against all races. It is harmful in all cases. The CEE endorses the law that applied racial exclusion, and asked for it to be applied across the private sector too.
“A dominance of the Indian”
The CEE’s proposals curb the largest minorities, and the smallest. The latest CEE report states that Indian men and women are 7.2% of skilled real estate workers, which “illustrates a dominance of the Indian” population at that level, it says, since the Indian working age population is 2.6% of the total.
What kind of person thinks a 2.6% group in the population doing 7.2% of real estate jobs at a particular level is a dangerous “dominance” that must be stopped by law enforcement? The CEE.
Another major sign that the CEE is out of touch with common sense is in its handling of the biggest concern in the country, which is, according to every poll commissioned by the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) since 2013, unemployment.
Black unemployment has roughly doubled since BEE kicked into high gear in 2008. How does the CEE deal with this fact? It goes unmentioned in its report.
What matters more to the CEE than black unemployment is something very different, summarised, for example, by the opening line of a report by Bongani Mdakane in Sunday World (“Corporate South Africa’s top jobs still a preserve of white boys’ club”, 8 July).
It reads: “The top echelons of corporate South Africa continue to be dominated by white males, the latest findings by the Commission of Employment Equity (CEE) show, painting a damning picture in the slow pace in redressing white dominance of the country’s economy”.
Here are the numbers behind that. The CEE showed that in 2017, white males numbered 33,130 (54.5%) in top management roles, out of 60,755 in total. In 2023, that had come down to 27,899 (48.9%) white males out of 57,094 top managers in total.
“Slow pace”
In other words, white males are now a minority of top managers, having been reduced by 5,231. The number of top managers has come down overall by 3,661 (6%). This is all supposed to be good, except for the “slow pace” of these job reductions.
In case anyone thought that having fewer top managers was a good thing, notice that the total number of jobs covered by the CEE report, around 7.4 million, has only increased by 1.3% between 2017 to 2023, a period when the total population increased by over 10%, from 56.5 million to 62.3 million.
For a bigger (and more reliable) picture of unemployment, in Q3 2017 the official unemployment rate was 27.7%, according to Stats SA, and grew to 31.9% by the same period in 2023. The latest rate is 32.9%.
None of those unemployment statistics were mentioned.
To paraphrase the old Orwellian saw: the CEE doesn’t seem to care about poor, black, unemployed people, it just wants the minority of top white male managers to be reduced at a faster pace.
When unemployment is mentioned, which is only twice in the body of the CEE report, it is as an afterthought in relation to foreigners, the second statement being this:
“The high representation of Foreign Nationals (3.4%) remains a concern at this occupational level [unskilled]. The unskilled level presents opportunities for unskilled South Africans to enter the labour market, but a number of these opportunities are being extended to Foreign Nationals, which exacerbates the high unemployment rate”.
Overwhelming evidence contradicts the CEE’s assertion. As one famous example, consider the World Bank’s 2018 “Mixed Migration” study whose “quantitative analysis on the impact of immigration on local jobs in South Africa finds that one immigrant worker generates approximately two jobs for South Africans”.
Ask around in any township, as I have done in dozens, and it is usually easy to find a foreign-owned spaza teeming with customers who benefit from the convenience and complain about political rabblerousers who would rather burn foreigners out, because they do not like the darker look of Somalis or the lighter look of Bengalis.
The CEE’s proposal that “3.4%” of the “unskilled” market is a threatening dominant group stealing jobs is not accompanied by any data reference.
Against minorities
But then again, the CEE never feels the need to justify its position against minorities, whether it be white males, black males, Indians, or foreign spaza owners. The CEE has its principle that things are supposed to look a certain way, deviation from which is “dominance” that must be stopped by law enforcement.
That racialist, redistributive approach should be replaced with an equal opportunities system that allows total jobs to grow as labour and investment mix freely in teams where people are judged by what they choose to do, not how they look.
*This article was offered to, though not published by, Sunday World
[Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash]
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