It’ll be alright in the end

Claire Bisseker’s column refers (“SA cannot afford another 10 wasted years March 23).

We’re not going to have another 10 wasted years a quick read of back-issues of Business Day reveals how strongly the past two years have been used to push back against the prior wasted years.

Things are not necessarily going to come right as and when it suits us it might indeed get worse but come right it will in the end. And if that end is in 50 years’ time and that’s to the greater benefit of those living then, that’s both noble and also simply how it will be.

The Observatory War Memorial was completed in the 1920s in Cape Town, around the same time as John Maynard Keynes was penning his rather redundant quip, built as a tribute to men from the area who served and died during the Great War. I’ve stood and stared at that monument with its lists of the dead, and at its inscription urging us to “build on the foundations laid by their great sacrifice”.

This is what is being asked of us all right now. Things are complicated and draw on a broader context, but it’s nowhere nearly as grim and bloody and dreadful and mindless as the idiotic slaughter of World War 1.

It’s about a far broader sense of community and collectivism, and getting things to work for the better of people you’ll never meet or know.

Take heart, be sensible, and all will be well.

Wynberg national minimum wage, some are still earning well below the legal floor. Many domestic workers are not registered with the department of employment & labour and can’t even apply for unemployment insurance monies.

Every domestic worker has to be legally registered with the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), and this lockdown period would be an opportunity to allow employers to come forward and pay back pay into the UIF to ensure their workers are properly covered. I am getting desperate calls from many employers confessing that they have never registered their domestic workers. The UIF will gladly accommodate retrospective registration, and this much-needed lockdown gives everyone a real opportunity to rethink their responsibilities as employers and properly register each and every domestic worker.

DA deputy shadow employment & labour minister