I am a proud employment equity candidate
Iam proud to be called an employment equity candidate and attribute various splendid jobs I’ve had to the policy’s success. Apartheid job reservation had other plans for people of my hue. We were destined for clothing factories when enclave South Africa still had a rag trade, or we were destined for jobs as tellers when banks were still in the analogue age. I didn’t want to do those jobs, but saw no way out until the winds of freedom started blowing and the governing ANC wrote affirmative action (what became known as employment equity) into our constitution and laws. I always wanted to be a journalist, but it felt like a dream too far until freedom opened up vistas of hope.
And so it is deeply sad to see how the term “employment equity candidate” has become like a leper’s badge attached to black people in the workplace. When Mark Lamberti — who resigned as CEO of Imperial Holdings on Wednesday — called the company’s former group financial manager, Adila Chowan, an “employment equity candidate”, she took him to court because he loaded the title with implications that she was not ready for a bigger challenge and was still in development.
It is attitudes like these that have turned the progressive policy of empowerment into a set of handcuffs for candidates who get roles because of its implementation. It is sad that a good law has been so corrupted by networks that have only ever known privilege and think apartheid was about racially reserved park benches and toilets.
I think it’s time for the beneficiaries of these policies to stand up and claim ownership so that generations of people who follow us also get opportunities. I think it’s time for those of us who are beneficiaries and have been gifted with a voice in public to wrench employment equity and empowerment away from white right-wing organisations like AfriForum and Solidarity and from the unconscious bias of leaders like Lamberti (he is certainly not alone in his views) and to return it to its purpose: to ensure equity and fairness in our workplaces.
My first job at the Weekly Mail was as part of an affirmative action training programme for young black kids like me who wanted to become writers. When Peter Bruce hired me onto the prestigious Financial Mail, it was to bolster the numbers of black people in that newsroom. Later, I became editor of the Mail &
Guardian, the feisty title’s second black editor and its first woman. At City Press, I was appointed the first woman editor. All of those were employment equity positions I will always be honoured to have held.
The appointments did not come my way because I was unqualified or inferior — I’m a grafter and I was challenged by the creativity and purpose of those roles to put my all into them. They came my way because, without laws, the privileged classes would never have learnt to see that black people and women had competence and skills to lead. Apartheid injured them too, by making them blind to anything except that which looked like them. Apartheid, designed to promote Afrikaner interests and to maintain Anglo-Saxon corporate interests, required not only oppression but active bias, and it lingers because it is intergenerational since sons learn from their fathers.
Lamberti says he has turned a corner, but to read the judgment which found he had impaired Chowan’s dignity by race and gender discrimination shows she could have had the accounting skills of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos but would still have had a mountain to climb because of who and what she is.
Bias, conscious and unconscious, is alive and well. Unconscious bias is when you are not alive to your own prejudice, and it usually requires deeply reflective and politically conscious leaders to understand it and see how it impedes progress in workplaces.
There’s a long way to go, but there are enough of us employment equity candidates to make enough of a stand to ensure that the term and the policy are no longer like a dompas hung around the necks of a new generation of people coming into the workplace.
Appointments did not come my way because I was unqualified or inferior — I’m a grafter