One of the important competencies of the Department of Employment and Labour is to inspect all employment situations across the board.
The department has a legal responsibility to ensure that health and safety rules are supreme in every workplace.
The department has been grossly negligent over the past 10 years.
I have been specifically requesting, even demanding, that the inspectorate be increased and properly resourced.
Almost monthly over the past five years, I have berated the department, orally and in writing, about the dearth of inspectors and the fact that they often don’t have the tools of the trade.
This same issue applies to the various bargaining councils, including the building industry bargaining council.
For some reason or other, the minister of employment and labour seems to favour some other entities within his department which receive enormous funding and do little work.
We all know that other entities within the department, such as the Unemployment Insurance Fund and the Compensation Fund, receive millions and millions of rand but don’t even submit their audit timeously and, invariably, over the past 35 years, have failed their audit.
Anecdotally, while the building in George was being built and thereafter collapsed, there has been a blitz of inspectors wanting to investigate, on the Atlantic Seaboard in Cape Town, the terms and conditions of domestic workers.
For that, the minister had surplus time and energy. It is typical of the department to target the “lower hanging fruit”. When we have real life and death issues such as building operations in George, the ministry always seems to be absent.
This reminds me of a story many years ago when the South African police, under the apartheid government, amassed more than 100 policemen to arrest naked people on Sandy Bay beach.
When the issue landed in the Supreme Court at the time, Justice Van den Heever asked the police commissioner to compare the incidences of murder, rape and robbery that weekend to the weekend before that.
All the statistics of increased crime were multiplied. When the policemen were doing something silly on Sandy Bay beach, true crime was occurring because of lack of police oversight.
I tell this story because while the departmental inspectors across South Africa are investigating non-urgent matters, they could have been doing what was necessary.
We wait for the outcome of the reports about what the ultimate cause was of the George disaster but, unfortunately, maybe all this could have been avoided if our government had done its job in the first place.
It doesn’t help to have Minister Thulas Nxesi arrive two days after the collapse and make a spectacle of himself in front of the media. What we needed was the duty of care and compassion exercised beforehand.
Our labour law is clear: the department has the responsibility and right to ensure that every employer exercises their duty of care towards each employee. This wasn’t the case.
We trust that the employers will be held responsible and the department face some sort of liability.
All this is no solace to the families who have lost loved ones and to those who will be helping their injured family members for many months, if not years, to come.
There must be consequences and, hopefully, those liable will do the right thing even now.
Every employer throughout the chain of companies that were on the site had to ensure that every employee was safe and was registered for the Unemployment Insurance Fund and the Compensation Fund.
It is important to check all the records, including the records from the various authorities within the building industry. It must be remembered that employment is a two-way street in that employees have to be productive and employers need to ensure that every employee is healthy, safe and properly covered under labour legislation.
Let’s hope and pray the incident does teach us a lesson and will be of some value to future workers in South Africa.
* Michael Bagraim is a veteran labour lawyer, and a Democratic Alliance MP.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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