Cape Town - Around 1,1 million coloured people, who make up the majority of the population in the Western Cape, would have to migrate to other provinces if the government continued to apply national racial demographics to accommodate its affirmative action policy of representivity.
This is according to trade union Solidarity, which released a report on Wednesday based on data from the quarterly labour force survey from Statistics South Africa.
The report stated that coloured people constituted 51 percent of the province’s population. Applying national demographics in appointments meant eight percent of coloured people would be considered for employment.
The report was released on the eve of an affirmative action court case, in which the Department of Correctional Services (DCS) is appealing a Labour Court ruling that it could not use the racial composition of the national economically active population for its employment equity in the Western Cape.
In 2013, 10 DCS employees - nine of them coloured and one white - argued in the Cape Town Labour Court that the DCS had hired employees in contravention of the Employment Equity Act. It was regarded as a victory for the Western Cape’s coloured community when Judge Hilary Rabkin-Naicker ordered the DCS to take immediate steps to ensure that both national and regional demographics were considered when setting employment equity targets.
The DCS, however, decided to appeal against the ruling last year. The case will be heard in the Labour Appeal Court on Thursday. Solidarity would argue that regional demographics be applied when making appointments. Solidarity’s report on Wednesday also revealed that around 190 000 white people would have to move from the Western Cape, and around 300 000 and 260 000 black people from Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal respectively. Chief executive of Solidarity, Dirk Hermann said this would lead to large-scale social engineering.
“The consequences are absurd to the extent one can almost not believe that the DCS wants to defend them in court.”
But Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union Western Cape (Popcru) provincial secretary Mncedisi Mbolekwa said applying possible migrations meant our becoming more integrated.
“More coloured people are needed in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape, for example. We must get them to go there. We fought for society to be integrated,” Mbolekwa said.
Cape Times