Have SA’s pro-poor policies become problematic?

It feels nice to be nice to the poor. So much so that we’ve set a whole policy arrangement on the ideal and called it pro-poor.

Theoretically, it’s an incredibly complex set of considerations aimed at economic inclusion and reducing inequality but South Africa has never been one for complexity in policy consideration. We just went with the tired approach of patch it with policy.

Too much unemployment? Make it impractical to dismiss anybody.

Lack of housing? Make eviction prohibitively arduous and expensive.

Poor basic education? Financially incentivise universities to push the kids through anyway.

That may work here and there until companies go under for being uselessly overstaffed, rent becomes too expensive due to the risk and graduates can’t find work.

Department of Labour’s new draft on dismissals

Patching it with policy can only go so far until the patches no longer do the trick and then they tend to run contrary to their objectives. Incredibly, it seems that the state has finally come to accept this and the first hints of addressing it are here.

Why else would the Department of Employment and Labour gazette a new draft code of good practice on dismissals? It’s a first since the 90s. What the draft aims to do is to streamline the dismissal process for small businesses so that they don’t have to go through cumbersome procedural systems to keep their human resources effective and efficient. Put differently, it means that small businesses will be able to fire employees more easily than before.

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To be fair, the nonsense of having to do warnings and procedures and hearings and the like that we’ve become used to was never actually the stated legal requirement. It’s just that with the CCMA commissioners scared of being taken on review, business being scared of the being taken to the CCMA and the Labour Court being scared of more review case load pushing against their overburdened seams, everybody seemed happy to capitulate to all the excessive procedure.

And government? They were all too happy that it made them look like angels to the working class.

Being protected from firing because firing is just too much effort is great. If and when you do eventually get fired, you have the added benefit of galloping down to the CCMA knowing that you’ll probably get a settlement on the strength of convenience. That’s a strong chance of another month or two of income for no work against no risk. When have you ever heard of anybody losing in the CCMA “with costs”?

No more burden of warnings and hearings

So what will the new draft code do if enacted? For a start, confirming that there is no need to engage in the burden of warnings upon written warnings upon hearings is a huge step in making CCMA commissioners consider the needs of the employer too.

Involving the concept of fairness also doesn’t overly weigh the scales in favour of the employer. Ultimately, it forces the CCMA (and employers) to focus on aspects that really matter when it comes to dealing with staff; a true ideal of fairness rather than some artificial 12 step programme.

If this is to pass, it would be interesting to see what will happen to other pro-poor policies. Will it be easier to evict non-paying tenants? Will it be more difficult to get into university? Will we start to get more serious on the delivery of basic education? It would certainly seem so.

A more existential question is, has the state begun to realise that there’s more to being pro-poor than patching up some laws to make it nice to be poor in South Africa? Better yet, has the state come to accept that being pro-poor actually also requires the country to be more functional than patching up social problems?

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