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Johannesburg - Jimmy Manyi's Commission for Employment Equity's annual reports, which keep watch over affirmative action, are worthless as a means of determining change in the labour market, says a report by a team of researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The researchers proposed that progress on affirmative action should be determined from data collected along with tax returns, rather than from the reports that employers have to submit to Manyi's commission every year.
Manyi's has used his reports for many years to show that employers support racism in the workplace and that there has been little or even no progress in affirmative action. They are regularly used to whip up emotions around affirmative action with organisations such as the Black Management Forum (BMF).
The research leading to the latest finding was in fact commissioned by the Department of Labour.
It was conducted by the Sociology of Work Unit (Swop), a research entity connected to the Wits sociology department, which investigates workplace issues.
Swop is held in high regard by the government, unions and even Cosatu. Two years ago its researchers were asked by the department to determine the impact of the Equity Employment Act, and measure inequality in the labour market.
The research team preferred to use Statistics South Africa?s half-year labour force figures and other sector databases to determine the racial and gender composition of the economy.
The employment equity commission's reports "cannot be regarded as representative surveys of the South African workplace" and "conclusions about transformation cannot be drawn on the basis of these reports".
Erratic reporting by companies, and poor administration of the report register, results in one year's survey group never being the same as that of the previous year. The 2005/2006 report covers only 2.4m workers. This is about 14.6% of the labour force.
The defective data prompts the question of whether companies can be expected to treat affirmative action at all seriously, says the report.
- Sake24