On Wednesday the 28th of June, Solidariteit and the Department of Employment and Labour signed an agreement that has effectively smashed affirmative action and the enforceability of racial discrimination in the workplace.

The agreement came after Solidariteit, the Afrikaner labour union which specialises in representing skilled labour and racial minorities, applied to the International Labour Organisation, a United Nations body which monitors and applies global standards for labour practices.

By applying to this body, Solidariteit leveraged the international treaties signed by the ANC government to force them to abide by the prohibitions against racial discrimination that fall under these agreements.

In previous years, such a case may not have had much bite, but the new Employment Equity regulations have been so stringent that they effectively would have forced mass layoffs for all minority groups, and outright banned the employment of some minorities in several provinces where their presence rounded down to zero. Employers would have five years to meet demographic targets.

The consequences of the brazen attack on the insufficiently black was that even the notoriously progressive United Nations was forced to admit that the ANC were going too far.

Solidarity mediated the dispute with the CCMA, and due to the legally binding nature of labour bargaining councils in South Africa, the outcomes will have the same strength as a court ruling, transforming the legislature in its implementation.

The settlement is extremely generous, providing exceptions to the demographic targets if the candidate is more skilled, effectively nullifying any ability for the government to enforce the targets, especially given the skill asymmetry between different demographics, and the agreement extends to affect promotions. Additionally, the agreement prohibited retrenchment of existing employees for the purposes of meeting racial quotas.  

The DA were rather public in their condemnation of the new legislation when it went into effect. However, their actions were rather tepid. They launched a legal case, albeit one with no teeth, given that the constitution does not forbid racial discrimination if the court believes it to be “fair”, and the majority of Constitutional Court judges are well-known to be in support of progressive expansion of the racial quota system as a means of restitution.

The party’s public statements were rather bold, calling on companies to violate these laws wherever they could. But the DA had not themselves announced a change in their own public hiring policies that would buck the trend of the Employment Equity framework.

Solidariteit were not very noisy about their victory, nor their initial efforts to fight the laws. But they were effective, and managed to achieve victory before the DA’s case was even heard in court.

The DA, to their credit, were doing all they could within the law, that is to say, not much. The constitutional order does little to prevent many varieties of wrongdoing. The toothlessness of the liberal opposition party in this regard is something that they seldom take action to remedy. The past decades have seen no effort at devolution, for example, until the Cape independence movement put sufficient pressure on them.

It is hard to say precisely what this teaches us – speculations about the party’s reluctance to engage in risky behaviour even where there is a moral imperative to do so can only be guesswork. In this case, failure to lead by example in the civil disobedience they called for with regard to these hiring policies does not inspire confidence.

But what this episode certainly shows, is that white labour has more heft than we give it credit for, given the dependency of the economy on skilled employees, and that the empowerment of the labour movement by our socialist ruling party has given their opponents a vital weapon to wield against them.

And it also teaches us that the best solutions often fall outside of party-political battles, and that political parties will not be the people to come and save us.

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