Musings: While South Africa continues to have good performance in its primary and secondary sectors, issues with its quaternary sector in terms of predictably creating highly-skilled entrants to the labour force combined with onerous and counterintuitive labour laws have been steadily eroding the quality of South African businesses in all sectors. Such erosion was demonstrated in the preparation for the 2010 soccer world cup where expats had to be brought into South Africa at great expense in order to augment the local workforce, which is a continuing trend that is observable in many large businesses in South Africa today. When viewed in the context of government’s inability to curb wildcat strikes and unreasonable demands from labour unions, the labour situation in South Africa is steadily worsening to the point where the intelligent question for business to ask is: “Is the cost of capital investment in terms of equipment cheaper than the cost of labour?” If the answer to such a question is equipment over labour, we should expect to see major layoffs and civil unrest as a result; which, when considered in the light of the Lonmin Marikana Mine incident, one could argue that civil unrest in response to layoffs is more than likely. Government also has major challenges in terms of standards of living particularly when it comes to safety and security within the region. Be it the potential for civil unrest or the staggering violent crime statistics in South Africa, many highly-skilled professionals have seen the safety and security issues as justifiable cause to immigrate to safer regions, taking their valuable and desperately needed skills with them. The net effect is that there are very few veritable professionals left in South Africa and businesses are instead often treated to presumptively arrogant caricatures of the Dunning-Kruger effect. If the labour situation in South Africa continues on its current trend downwards, it seems inevitable that South Africa will have more than just languages and accents in common with Zimbabwe. Government needs to take meaningful action to repair the quaternary sector, regulate unions, improve labour law, and address safety if South Africa has any hope at 1) producing and retaining the skills it sorely needs and 2) making a sound argument to attract and retain sorely needed foreign investment. The irony: it seems that like many other South African organisations, government suffers at least equally if not most from the skills deficit in the South African labour market. Asking government to improve makes about as much sense as commanding a man who is ill to be well. The only alternative it seems is for the South African electorate to vote for a government that has the skill to address our issues, which skills the ANC has arguably demonstrated it lacks.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 10:49:23 +0000
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