Chairperson, Ministers, hon Members of Parliament, it must be noted that over the past two decades business owners in South Africa have increasingly sought to externalise the traditional full-time, permanent employer-employee relationship into the triangular labour brokers' connection. This occurs when labour brokers make workers available to third-party clients that assign their duties and supervise the execution of their duties.
In what appears to be a glaring omission, section 198 of the principal Act does not extend the shared responsibilities of some of the most significant protection offered by the Labour Relations Act, 66 of 1995, such as protection against unfair dismissal and unfair labour practices perpetrated by the client against his or her workers.
Clients may instruct labour brokers only to provide persons who belong to a particular race group; persons who follow a particular religion or who are not married or pregnant. This, I submit, does extend to unequal treatment between permanent employees of a client and those persons placed by a labour broker. It is within that context that the ANC argued that in amending section 198 of the principal Act, placement of persons by labour brokers should not exceed three months. This is to be certain, whether vacancies are of a temporary nature or permanent. We are avoiding super- exploitation of vulnerable workers by inserting these three months.
Chairperson, I think it is important to put the temporary employment service into context; that section 198 talks to the temporary employment service. As other speakers before me have already indicated, employers normally use temporary employment service workers who have been placed by those temporary employment services for the longer term, and the purpose of reducing that by amending the current section 198 is to avoid that situation because one cannot have a worker who is temporary for the rest of his or her life. If someone is employed on a temporary basis, it is for a specified period and thereafter it is no longer temporal if the services of that worker are still required; hence we are saying three months will be enough.
A number of issues have been raised by the DA in particular as well as Cope on the issue of balloting. Refering to section 64 of the Labour Relations Act, Act 66 of 1995, this is an Act that replaced the Labour Relations Act of 1956, where balloting was a necessity in terms of that legislation.
Now, mindful of the national strike by NUM in 1987, where more than 170 000 workers went on strike, what happened after balloting? The employers came back and challenged that. Mindful of the national strike of Numsa of 1992, there was a ballot that was followed, but then, what happened? So, you can't then come here today and argue that in order for a strike to be legitimate there is the need for a ballot. You can't then say that that is democratic! [Interjections.]