Workers’ Day: The new struggle is the struggle for jobs

1 May 2016

Note to Editors: The following remarks were made today by the DA Leader, Mmusi Maimane, during a Workers’ Day event at Spin Street House in Cape Town. Maimane was joined by the City of Cape Town’s MMC for Economic Development, Cllr Garreth Bloor.

Today we celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Workers’ Day in South Africa – a day in which we honour the long fought struggle to secure fair employment standards and to establish a culture of human and workers’ rights, now protected and enshrined in section 23 of our Constitution.

It is also a day in which we celebrate and honour the millions of working South Africans who help build this country every day, forming the backbone of our economy. Workers who provide services, teach our children, build infrastructure, make products and look after us in hospitals. Without them, our country would simply not move forward.

Yet while we celebrate Workers’ Day, we cannot forget that 1 in every 3 people in South Africa currently cannot find work.

While the struggle pre 1994 was to secure workers’ rights, the struggle post 1994 is the struggle for jobs and employment. Political freedom has been attained; yet economic freedom is still a pipedream for the 8.2 million jobless South Africans.

Everyone has a right to earn a living, accumulate wealth, live where we want, love who we want, say what we believe, develop our talents and pursue our dreams. But without a job, we can never realise these freedoms.

Amid job-killing national government policy, where we govern, the DA has taken huge strides towards creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurs and small business to thrive, so that new jobs can be created. 

At a time when 8.2 million South Africans are without a job, we can no longer afford to have poorly thought-out laws that make finding a job even harder.

Small businesses and entrepreneurs have the potential to be the engine for job creation, but South Africa has one of the highest failure rates for start-ups and entrepreneurs. Making it easier for entrepreneurs to start up and grow their small businesses, by cutting unnecessary red tape and regulation, is vitally important in order to ensure real jobs are created. Research shows that millions of new small businesses is the only sustainable way to beat unemployment. Small businesses already employ the huge majority of new workers in the economy. The DA believes that to create five million new jobs, we need one million new small businesses. 

Since we began governing in 2006, the DA-run City of Cape Town has successfully implemented a programme of action to identify and repeal legislation, policies and by-laws and cut red tape in the City. The purpose of this project has been to make it easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs to start and thrive in Cape Town, thereby making it easier to create jobs in Cape Town.

Rather than treating red-tape issues as a matter of helping with compliance of already burdensome laws and policies, the City of Cape Town has - within its legislative powers - driven major changes to regulations.

Beside me today is a pile of the over 300 outdated by-laws, policies and plans that have been repealed since 2006 by the City of Cape Town (see full list attached here). Many previous policies were predicated on old apartheid laws that had never been repealed when the Metro was run by the ANC. These by-laws, policies and regulations, many from the apartheid era, still exist in other metros, and act as a hindrance to entrepreneurs who want to start up small businesses in these cities. 

The results are there for all to see: there has been a small business boom in Cape Town that has led to the creation of many shared working spaces, like Spin Street House, where we’re hosted today. Most importantly, unemployment in the Western Cape is now at 19%, the lowest in the country. Investment in the city has increased, while it is dropping nationally, in turn creating new jobs. 

However, the benefits are not just economic. The repealing of these pieces of legislation and policy also seeks to redress the economic exclusion which was a legacy of apartheid. In terms of the apartheid legislation, previous municipalities had passed by-laws that had prohibited the setting up of businesses, or certain types of businesses, in some of the townships that bordered them. 

Also included in the repealing process were old informal trading laws, which have fallen away and been replaced by a new policy that provides more trading spaces and the security of tenure that comes with permits for new trading spaces. This impacts positively on a large number of people, as a total of 161 000 people in Cape Town are employed in the informal sector, making up at least 11.3% of the total workforce of the city. 

This is just one of the many steps DA governments take to ensure that real jobs are created where we govern. We also provides access to a Small Business Support Office, established to promote entrepreneurship and business-driven job placements. We help business people to find the most appropriate support service from a network of over 90 business development organisations that are located in the city

Moreover, the DA has created a comprehensive Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), which allocates job opportunities on a fair basis. Cape Town is currently the only metro that has implemented an impartial EPWP jobs allocation database, which has eliminated corruption by officials and councillors who hand out jobs to friends and family.

We paid out a total of R176 million in wages to EPWP jobs in 2014/15 alone – more than any other metro in the country. 

Cape Town now has the lowest unemployment rate of all of the metro’s across the country, showing that where the DA’s governs, there you have the best hope of finding a job. This can be a reality for all cities and municipalities come 3 August this year. The lesson is simple. Jobs are created where small businesses can flourish, and small businesses flourish where the DA governs. In this local election, South Africans want opportunities to work. They want change that brings jobs. The story of how we have supported small business where we do govern, shows exactly how that change is possible. 

The DA will continue to effect change that creates jobs and moves South Africa forward again.

Issued by the DA, 1 May 2016