Rainy queues for cop shop reveal dire job shortage
September 11, 2009
The sobering reality of being unemployed struck home this week as an estimated 20 000 people queued for kilometres in the rain from the early hours of the morning to apply for 300 learnership posts at Durban's metro police.
Yesterday morning these people, from the ages of 18 to 30, holding brown envelopes and folders with their CVs, stood patiently in a queue several kilometres long that wrapped around the perimeter of the Durban Botanic Gardens and beyond. The day before the scene was the same.
According to The Mercury, the positions are for a one-year training course that holds no guarantee of a permanent job. But even if successful applicants do not secure a full-time job with the police, a training certificate means full-time employment could be found elsewhere.
Those who get the learnership will earn an allowance of R1 600 a month while being trained and if they secure a job with the metro police they could get a salary of R8 400 a month as well as medical aid.
In advertising the learnerships the metro police targeted people with no experience who were unemployed.
This is just one example in one city of how many people are looking for work.
According to the Department of Labour's 2009 annual report for the fiscal year to March, about 421 686 job seekers were on its database, compared with 169 059 last year. In the same period, 26 332 placement opportunities were registered on the database, up from 15 364 the before. These figures underline, again, the colossal gap between the number of people looking for work and the prospect of finding it.
In this financial year, the Labour Department has ambitious targets through various programmes to place 74 000 work seekers in jobs. It intends to protect 31 000 existing jobs through the training lay-off scheme for workers identified for retrenchment or a plan to assist distressed firms.
It's a tall order. But given that many citizens' circumstances are becoming dire, it's a job that must be done properly.
Idling interconnects
As expected, more people are entering the interconnection rate debate. The latest is Solidarity, which sent a memorandum to the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) in which the union calls for a big cut in interconnect fees and a thorough probe into the true cost of interconnectivity.
Whatever Solidarity sent to Icasa, the regulator has probably seen many times.
But more pressure from stakeholders will help speed up the process. Icasa and telecoms operators will start the process of reducing interconnection fees with the reduced rate expected to kick in on February.
There have been many suggestions on the ideal interconnection rate, which many have said should be between 60c and 90c.
But lowering the interconnection fees won't automatically reduce the prices consumers pay. What Icasa should do is ensure operators reduce what they charge subscribers and that no increases in other related services creep in, as tends to happen.
Icasa should be able to wrap up these negotiations soon as it already has all the financial details showing how much cellular operators spend on providing each service. This financial model is called the chart of accounts/cost allocation manual.
Basically the manual will enable the regulator to help customers understand what it costs network operators to provide a particular service and how that relates to the price paid by users.
Icasa has been sitting with this data for years and by now it should have a full understanding of how the companies operate. Unfortunately, it has to follow a regulatory process before imposing any fee reduction.
But now that the discussions with the operators and agreement thereafter will probably be done outside any regulatory framework, Icasa should guard against operators taking the upper hand.
Hidden bonus billions
Loss-making Eskom has hidden its bonus figures for top management after a huge furore last year when performance bonuses to the tune of R10.3 million were awarded to executive management.
An insider said that bonuses were paid to senior staff members to the tune of R2 billion in the 2008/09 year, with this figure hidden away in financial statements under "provisions". There is no breakdown in the statements of the bonuses paid to executive management, but after MPs on the energy committee commented on the matter this week, chief executive Jacob Maroga said he had "taken note" of the objections.
In the presence of energy committee chairperson Elizabeth Thabete, he did not offer to repay any bonuses and said that matters of the financial statements of the entity would be fully interrogated by Parliament's public enterprises portfolio committee at a meeting expected next week.
As DA public enterprises spokesman Manie van Dyk pointed out, Eskom had to be bailed out to the tune of R60bn in 2007/08 when it made a relatively small loss of about R200m - small compared with this year's loss of R9.7 billion.
Van Dyk said as a consequence it seemed Eskom would "once again" have to be bailed out, a cost borne by the taxpayer. He noted that the situation was exacerbated by the awarding of perks to senior management, despite the dysfunctional nature of the institution. Over the past four years Eskom had paid out millions in bonus shares. Even if directors were fired the value of the bonus shares were still paid out.
Apparently an internal report on workplace productivity shows that about 30 percent of staffers were regularly not at work or unable to perform their tasks. A further 30 percent were effectively running the entity, while the remaining 40 percent were actually obstructionist.
What a time to hand out bonuses of R2bn, one might have thought.
Edited by Peter DeIonno. With contributions by Samantha Enslin-Payne, Thabiso Mochiko and Donwald Pressly
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