Cape Town - The Department of Employment and Labour in the Western Cape has confirmed that several construction sites in the Southern Cape have been closed as a result of a blitz conducted this week.
Between 100-150 construction sites were visited by the department since Monday and as of Wednesday, five to six construction sites were closed.
This was in response to the devastating collapse of a partially-built five-story building in George on May 6, leaving several workers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, and Lesotho trapped beneath the rubble.
Eighty-one workers were on site at the time of the collapse and 33 workers subsequently died.
In a media statement issued by the Garden Route District Municipality on May 17, rescue and recovery operations for the building collapse is said to have lasted 260 hours.
The site was then classified as a crime scene and handed over for formal investigation by the police who will then also hand the site over to the department of Employment and Labour for their investigation to be conducted.
The Western Cape Government too launched an investigation a day after the incident.
Department of Labour Provincial Chief Inspector David Esau said one construction site was closed due to a violation in terms of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
“It is not within our mandate to have people arrested. It’s in our mandate to hand the documents or copies of permits and passports over to Home Affairs who will then do the verification and go forward with any arrests should they find anyone,” Esau said.
“When you close a site, you actually prohibit a site from continuing with their work until they have rectified what we call a life threatening situation. It could be anything from not having a COC or not having certain things in place and these things if they are not in place, can cause bodily harm to anybody.”
The exact figures of how many construction sites were closed will be released on Monday, Esau said.
“We are still in the process of concluding the project of this week in the Southern Cape. What we have uncovered is especially the issue around (illegal) foreigners in the construction sector and so we wanted to check, because the example, based on the George collapse has indicated to us that quite a number of (illegal) foreigners are working on the construction site and that’s the reason why we wanted to see if the other construction sites comply or not comply with the issue of migration. And then obviously the safety conditions on the construction site,” Esau said.
“It started on Monday because I felt it’s important, now that we are there busy with the investigation, to alert all companies that we need to comply with these kinds of laws because we’ve just seen the consequences of not complying.”
Esau said they’ve covered George, Mossel Bay and Knysna.
Addressing a dialogue on the National Labor Migration Policy (NLMP) on March 8, Employment and Labour Minister, Thulas Nxesi, said the country had no problem with migrants, however problems arise when these individuals were undocumented. He said preference for labour by foreign nationals was given in order to exploit these individuals for cheap labour.
He also warned employers who continue to employ undocumented foreign nationals, subjecting them to poor labour standards, not declaring them in their employment records and failing to register them for existing social protection measures such as the UIF, Pension Fund and Compensation Fund.
“The risk brought by these illegal practices is too high for the stability of the country. As the Department of Employment and Labour, we will continue to participate in joint inspections that are organised with Police, Home Affairs, Road Traffic Management and Customs that have proven to be successful in dealing with various transgressions,” Nxesi said.