Labour brokers are essential to the South African Police Service (SAPS), which spent R366-million on them in 2008/09, the Democratic Alliance said on Thursday.
In a written reply to a parliamentary question by the DA, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa said they were used "to provide guard duties in instances where there are not sufficient permanent employees available to render services".
They were also used for non-core responsibilities like "cleaning services as well as some artisans services", which "allows for the SAPS to focus on its core functions by making trained police officials available for operational duties".
Responding to this, DA spokesman Ian Ollis said this illustrated three points.
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First, labour brokers provided essential services to a police service that already faced a severe skills deficit.
Banning them would place a further burden on the police.
"There could be no harsher indictment of calls from the far left for labour broking to be banned than the fact that it will under-equip us in the fight against crime," he said.
Second, banning labour brokers would stop the spending of R336-million on employment.
"In other words, a government that is using the extended public works programme to eke out as many low paid jobs as possible, wants to go out of its way to prevent people from being employed.
"So far, ministers from all government departments have revealed spending a total R519m on labour brokers for the 2008/09 financial year, which means that banning labour broking across the board would cut another R519m worth of salaried positions.
"This leads on to the third point: we have seen countless hysterical claims from far left ministers like [Higher Education Minister] Blade Nzimande and [Labour Minister] Membathisi Mdladlana that labour broking is akin to slave labour.
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