Lentswe, Klerksdorp - The DA reacted with horror to the Department of Employment & Labour’s instruction to employers in a letter to use the repealed 1950 Population Registration Act to classify staff by race. Michael Bagraim, spokesperson on Employment & Labour, called it the revival of apartheid-era race classification.
“This shows government cannot enforce its quotas without apartheid-style classification, pushing the burden onto businesses,” he said.
The DA is planning to intensify legal action to stop “this revival of apartheid logic and unlawful quotas’’.
“This instruction is as shocking as it is unlawful, and the DA is already examining every legal avenue available to put an immediate stop to it. South Africans know exactly what the Population Registration Act represented. It was the law that separated families, dictated where people could live, and laid the foundation for every other piece of apartheid discrimination.
“To drag that law back into public life, three decades after its repeal, is nothing short of an assault on the dignity and equality of every person in this country. Instead of accepting responsibility for its own unconstitutional quotas, the government now wants businesses to take on the role once played by apartheid officials: determining the race of employees using outdated and deeply offensive categories,” Bagraim said.
The latest letter from the Department proves that the government intends to force employers into impossible positions, either comply with rigid quotas that ignore the realities of individual firms, or face crippling fines of up to 10% of turnover.
“South Africans fought hard for a non-racial democracy. We will not allow the Department of Labour to smuggle apartheid-thinking back into our law under any guise. The DA will resist this every step of the way.”
