Ml Muhammad Bham | mbham@radioislam.co.za
16 May 2023 | 11:00CAT
2 min read

Photo Credit: Live Career

The DA says it is outraged by the draft targets, published for comment on Friday, regarding the Employment Equity Amendment Act.

The party claims that it appears to target coloured and Indian employees, and they will challenge the Act in the Constitutional Court.

The Institute for Race Relations has been vocal about the EEA for months.

The Employment Equity Amendment Act allows ministers to set targets for specific sectors and provinces. As the Act stands at present, for certain occupation levels, from upper management and senior management, the minister can say that for designated employers (people who employ fifty or more employees), they can only employ a certain amount of people of certain racial groups.

For example, in Limpopo, it says the proportion of Coloured people to be employed in senior management in mining is zero per cent. That means no coloured people can be employed in a senior role in mining in the Limpopo area.

There is also a fear that this Act can prejudice black employees.

In the Northern Cape, a company of designated employers, depending on the management level, can only employ black women up to a level of 18%. If a company has a proportion of black women in senior management or out of senior management, 50% of the people are black women, that would be out of step with the Employment Equity Amendment Act, and the company could face fines and other punitive measures.

There is a fear that the Act will lead to all kinds of perverse outcomes, which goes back to Jimmy Manyi’s days. Jimmy Manyi said there was an oversupply of Coloured, meaning there were too many coloured people being employed in the Western Cape.

The focus on race leads to perverse insensitivity and will be challenged.

The Employment Equity Amendment Act is trying to reach demographic representativity, meaning that the proportion of people in certain occupations should match their proportion in the general population. Now it is impossible to reach that kind of thing because, in South Africa, the proportion of black people is about 80%. Still, it’s impossible to say that 80% of everybody in each occupation must be of African origin.

Specific sectors will have more people of African origin, and some sectors will have fewer, and for each of these scenarios, there are complex reasons.

Listen to the full interview on Sabahul Muslim with host Sulaimaan Ravat here