The African Truck Drivers’ Forum and Allied South Africa (ATDF-ASA) has mobilised its own inspection teams, drawn up a list of defaulting companies countrywide, and is holding daily virtual meetings across all provinces to monitor the government’s commitment to attending to its grievances as a condition to withdrawing the national shutdown which was slated for yesterday.
This is as the forum on Sunday held an emergency meeting with government officials from the departments of Home Affairs, Transport, Labour, the Presidency and the South African Police Service to avert the shutdown that had been planned barely a week ahead of the national elections.
ATDF-ASA secretary-general Gugu Sokhela yesterday said the forum had acquiesced to the request to temporarily suspend the shutdown after the government entities undertook to intensify physical inspections on the list of companies identified as not complying with regulations in continuing to hire foreign nationals.
“We ourselves will have operations where we will do inspections at these companies we have identified as not complying. The inspectors normally meet the trucks on the roads and do not follow up with the employers. We have ensured that physical inspections are done,” Sokhela said.
“We have submitted the lists of the companies in all provinces that are not complying with the rules of the Bargaining Council. We will be inspecting those.”
Sokhela said the forum had made it clear that it would resume the shutdown if the implementation plan agreed to was not executed.
He said KwaZulu-Natal alone had identified about 200 companies that still persisted to circumvent established employment procedures, while the national tally was a little more than a 1 000 companies.
Some of these companies, according to Sokhela, registered at the Bargaining Council and pretended to be compliant but then hide their processes.
The effect of this, he said, was that the companies that complied were losing business to those that did not, because they paid cheaper wages.
The shutdown was expected to see more than 700 truck drivers from Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng protest against the employment of foreigners, as well as wage disparities in the sector.
In response to enquiries, the Department of Labour confirmed that it had undertaken commitments to address the grievances of truck driver bodies with regard to the companies that are non-compliant with the working conditions and environment, as well as alleged employment of undocumented foreign nationals.
“The Department of Employment and Labour is attending to complaints that were raised in relation to non-compliance of some companies with employment laws,” it said in a reply to Business Report.
“This is being carried out through visiting the workplaces in question and testing their compliance/noncompliance-levels with our laws. This will be an ongoing process as is normal practice with regard to compliance enforcement.”
The Road Freight Association’s (RFA) CEO Gavin Kelly said members of the association were compliant and were fully aware of the current labour and immigration requirements.
“The problem remains that a vast number of transport companies would seem to be non-compliant in this regard (and if compliant, then the Department of Employment and Labour needs to satisfactorily prove to the stakeholders of the task team that this is so,” Kelly said.
He acknowledged that the forum was protesting to gain the attention of the departments that had undertaken to rectify the issues.
“There was a 10-point plan accepted by all stakeholders, but this has not seen progress as one would have liked,” Kelly said.
The ATDF-ASA last month warned of the ticking time bomb as the task team, which was to serve as a conduit to the inter-ministerial committee and comprised all stakeholders within the road freight industry, the departments of Transport, Home Affairs, Employment and Labour, the SAPS, International Relations and Cooperation, the RFA, and the Trucking Association of South Africa, among others, “has faded into oblivion without addressing the 11-point plan charted in 2022”.
BUSINESS REPORT