The topic of labour broking makes the news on a regular basis at the moment and the efforts to ban labour brokers in South Africa. Essentially what labour brokers do is that they hire the employees, and hire them out to various companies so that the companies can avoid the very difficult labour laws we have in South Africa. Approximately 1 million people are apparently employed on this basis and if labour broking is banned, they believe that rather than lose their jobs, which some say will happen, they will now have full-time employment and more rights with their employer.

Big business is very much in favour of labour brokers and trade unions of course are anti them. I find any issue to do with employment law very difficult to write about on my blog, because the vast majority of people who respond are in fact employees, and until you have run a business, you will simply not appreciate the expenses involved with the current labour laws in South Africa, and which is why international businesses avoid us to a large extent, and probably why we have one of the largest unemployment rates in the world.

Employees who have a job don’t seem to care about the fact that we have a large unemployment rate, and simply are concerned about their rights. In fact, I find the comments of people that I know, to be particularly anti-government for example, quite interesting, because to a large extent they actually favour the government policies, even though they claim to be anti-government or anti-ANC on most issues. I think that our country will start to boom and grow faster once we make our laws more in line with those of other countries and make it easier to fire people who are lazy, incompetent or even impertinent rather than the very cumbersome and expense procedures we have now. Once we have a more competitive economy we will be able to hire more people, the rand will strengthen and the costs that people pay for living in an uncompetitive country, including the inflation rate as well as the petrol price, may well reduce but I think that at the moment one is talking, just as one reads in the comments, to people who do not want to hear, will not listen and while there is no doubt that in time South Africa will have to face the music and change labour laws, with business after business saying this on radio and on TV, it is probably going to take 10 to 15 years before we start to see a bit of a balance.