Chairperson, Madam Minister, ah ha! The grand toilet war of election 2011 has finally come and gone, and here we are considering government service delivery again with the 2011 Labour Budget Vote and business plan.
Treasury and Cabinet have approved a larger budget for the Department of Labour this year. Together with several virements in the last financial year, the department and its entities are receiving a slightly bigger slice of the pie than they had previously received.
As we approach the new financial year, the department has seen unprecedented change that has left its staff and entities reeling. We had the Director-General of Labour suspended and sacked; we had the longstanding Minister of Labour sacked; and the Chairperson of the Committee on Labour was also replaced.
We welcome our new Minister, as I've done before in Parliament, and I believe we have a new DG who is to be welcomed in the person of Mr Nhleko, but we must assess whether this department is running at full steam and whether it is delivering on its mandate for all South Africans. With one in every four South Africans now voting for the DA, we have a vested interest in seeing that the department does run smoothly. One in four South Africans would expect us to look after their interests and we shall do so.
Incidentally, if one looks at the election results, just briefly, at the total votes cast in the City of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane, Pretoria, the ANC received 911 006 votes whilst the DA received 1 053 267 votes. Therefore, if the former Director-General of Labour, Mr Jimmy Manyi, had succeeded in moving certain people out of the Western Cape to the Eastern Cape and Gauteng, he would have handed us another two metros; thank you very much.
So, let's look at some of the Department of Labour's details. The Sheltered Employment Factories, as you have pointed out, Minister, are in a terrible state. Their subsidies have been reduced and government departments no longer have to purchase from these factories. Without new markets for their products, they are slowly going down the financial drain and, instead of providing more opportunities for the disabled citizens, a few thousand fewer people now work for the Sheltered Employment Factories than in 1994.
However, there are plenty of ways for disabled workers to be sought: Everyday Compensation Fund deals with South Africans who become permanently disabled and who cannot work. Why does the Department of Labour not hand their names over to the Sheltered Employment Factories so that they can find work again?
What about the military veterans from various liberation movements who also sit without work, some of whom are disabled? There is silo thinking. The one in four South Africans who support us would expect us to demand better co-operation from government departments. Our people deserve better!
The moving of skills development from the Department of Labour to the Department of Higher Education and Training has been extremely messy and badly managed to the extent that the Auditor-General, I believe, cannot comment on the financials of the Skills Fund.
The Department of Higher Education and Training is, I'm told, going to get a disclaimer as a result of the botched handover process. Proper governance or accounting procedures were never adopted in the department of origin, that is, the Department of Labour, and have similarly not been set up in the Department of Higher Education and Training. What a mess!
There are question marks over where the money went during the handover period. One version of the story circulating among the staff - some of whom are here today - is that the money is being run through the banking accounts of Minister Nzimande because too few bank accounts were opened timeously for the transfer. I hope that post audit, these irregularities will be sorted out and that the Department of Labour's hand in this mess will be clarified. Where is Mr Manyi when we want to ask him these questions?
But there's more: I personally conducted visits to the offices of the Department of Labour in Tshwane, Johannesburg and elsewhere and discovered that on one floor of a government building there is a whole range of training staff sitting idle. Now, before you laugh, let me explain: They seem to be what remains of the development staff of the old Department of Labour. It seems that when the former Minister Mdladlana transferred the budgets for skills development to Higher Education and Training as requested, he just kept the staff in the Department of Labour without telling anyone, so that the department no longer has a budget to pay for the training courses that they have been offering. So these staff members sit side by side watching soccer, or finding stapling to do. Oops!
I now believe that Mr Moratoba will be moving these staff members into a new government employment agency, except that we are still arguing in Nedlac about the content of enabling legislation, because it's not yet been approved. I suppose the staff will have to continue watching soccer or maybe the Minister needs some more stapling to be done. Unfortunately, Minister, the one in four South Africans that we represent wants us to do better. Some of their tax money is being used after all!
The Training Layoff Scheme has been equally disastrous. Under this programme about 75 500 workers have been retrained. That's great! However, almost R3 billion was pumped into that programme, so this huge fund is still sitting there. While people in South Africa have no jobs, the money is in the bank account - what a disaster! Let's be honest, it was a great idea in theory, but in practice there wasn't the execution to follow through.
None of the Setas have yet been able to account for how much money they spent on the Training Layoff Scheme. How much did they use? No one knows! How much per person did it cost to train those people? Nobody knows that either. I only hope that the Auditor-General is taking note of that problem. The DA's one in four voters is certainly taking note.
The Essential Services Committee also needs an urgent intervention. It is essentially dysfunctional at present and has no real budget to run its operations. It has a Minimum Services Agreement, but this does not address the real concerns because it is too generic and it does not clarify who may and who may not go on strike. Therefore it is largely ignored by unions and employers. One in four of those South Africans now voting for the DA is affected by this chaos and they want some action.
My colleague will be talking about the Compensation Fund and Unemployment Insurance Fund, UIF, so I won't step on his toes, but I just want to give you one illustration of a man who contacted me about his workplace injury.
He applied for compensation from the Compensation Fund, of all places. Months went by without a response. He lost his house; he lost his car; and he moved into somebody's garage, for which he was paying a small rental.
He had an eye injury that needed urgent medical attention, which he did not receive because it was not approved, despite his completing forms, handing in medical reports and going to medical examiners. I escalated his claim; I escalated his appeal; and I e-mailed the relevant officials. He was then thrown out of the garage that he was living in because he couldn't pay that small rental. I finally received a call from the mother of his children telling me that this past Christmas he had committed suicide. She wanted to know if there was any money coming for the children. It still haunts me.
Many people in South Africa are very, very poor and when they are injured at work or can no longer work, we should be able to respond to their needs speedily. The current state of affairs is just not good enough. We are still shuffling 20 pieces of paper for every application that comes in. It should be computerised and it should be electronic.
Mr Manyi, when he was the DG, should have been fixing the computer system and streamlining the funds instead of playing with racial quotas.
I want to close by examining the textile industry. Government has contributed to the ruin of this industry. In Newcastle, we have several factories making textiles and paying workers below the minimum wage. The Department of Labour applied the legislation, shut them down, and 15 000 employees lost their jobs. Some of those companies relocated to Swaziland and Lesotho; and the remainder of those unemployed workers turned on the unions and Bargaining Council and asked for the companies to be reopened. Some were reopened, so nothing has been achieved in this process, except the loss of jobs.
The DA calls on the Minister to implement a cadet internship programme for the textile industry which takes on apprentices that are paid a lower wage while they are being trained.
We also call on the Minister to apply an exemption for the Bargaining Agreement for the Commission Embroidery Industry which has been wiped out because each business is too small to comply with the various agreements of the Bargaining Council and the margins are too low.
I do not understand the rationale for small companies, whose staff are not unionised, being forced to pay over levies to the Bargaining Council in lieu of union fees. For what? That's yet another tax with no purpose. It's like a punishment for no services rendered.
I also call on the Minister to conduct joint operations with customs and excise officials, as the DA is aware that customs officials at the port in Durban find it difficult to distinguish between cotton, wool, silk and polyester. When these goods land in the port they allow the goods through with the wrong valuation and, therefore, the incorrect import duties and levies are applied.
There is also a problem with new goods being brought in second hand, and officials are not averse to rearranging the invoicing to suit, for a small fee. Bribes kill jobs!
The reason that this is a labour issue is that for each shipment that comes in without paying the appropriate duties, jobs are lost and the margins in Newcastle in our factories get smaller and smaller. If we want the decent work that we have been talking about through the ILO for textile workers, we have to stop the cheating at the harbours and the ports of entry. A cluster of measures like these will improve the financial position of our textile industry and push wages to an acceptable level.
I have in a previous speech welcomed the Minister to her department. However, I call on her now to urgently intervene in these cases. People are suffering; industries are suffering; and many agreements are out of date. Thank you very much. [Applause.]