Time to look at how Nedlac deal mutated

The placing on ice of the national minimum wage has had surprising positives, not least being the ANC’s conciliatory attitude and handling of the affair.

It could have been an embarrassing saga as the legislation would have been returned to Parliament by the Constitutional Court had it been rushed through without following due process. Political maturity has prevailed, and now a roadmap can be sketched to benefit the most vulnerable workers in the country.

The draft policy was launched in February 2017 and will improve the lives of 6-million workers who earn less than the R20 an hour minimum wage level that has been agreed upon.

The decision to push back the implementation came after protests by labour unions and opposition parties that the parliamentary process was being rushed.

But of more significance is that the delay will allow enough time for MPs, organised labour and academics to interrogate how the agreement reached at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) transformed into the bill that is now before the parliamentary portfolio committee on labour.

Nedlac is supposed to formulate the labour market policy by consensus between the state, labour and business. By empowering state lawyers to change its resolutions, the labour minister and President Cyril Ramaphosa have undermined the entity’s role.

The labour federations that form part of the labour constituency at Nedlac were fuming at the discovery of distortions of the agreement signed in February 2017. Cosatu, the Federation of Unions of SA and the National Council of Trade Unions argued that if passed in its current form the bill would defeat the point of the policy as it would not extend enough protections to workers to ensure they enjoy the benefits of the minimum wage.

During the Nedlac process, agreement was reached on the definition of “worker”. It would extend beyond the normal scope of employment as per the Basic Conditions of Employment Act to include vulnerable workers.

This was not captured correctly, with the Department of Labour conceding its officials were wrong to include the definition in section 1 of the act, which was rejected at Nedlac. This was the only deviation the department agreed to correct, leaving the rest to Parliament, where organised labour and other interested parties presented their objections when the committee heard public submissions.

This is not the first time that the department has made a mockery of the Nedlac process by changing content of agreements when drafting bills. The shoddy handling of the Unemployment Insurance Fund bill points to systemic issues in the department.

The process to amend the Unemployment Insurance Act started in 2013 and was supposed to be finalised before the 2014 elections, but it was 2017 before it was eventually signed into law after being through Parliament twice. When it was tabled the second time in 2016, the Department of Labour had introduced a provision that said women who had abortions would not be covered for maternity leave. It then had to correct this.

It is unacceptable for the department to simply apologise for errors in legislation without any consequences. By not taking action against the officials involved, Ramaphosa is cementing a culture at the department that has now led to the postponement of a law he promised in his first state of the nation address would be launched on Workers Day.

The most recent developments also raise the question of whether Nedlac still has a role when a department can simply override the compromise agreement.