By Mandy Moussouris

Research into various sectors show that skills development is not assisting sufficiently the transformation of workplaces.

Skills development should play a dual role of satisfying the needs of industry as well as a means of redressing the inequity of the past that remains within our labour market. The problem is that, outside of Industrial Strategy processes, there has been little or no attempt to create formal links between skills development, job creation and industry development. In addition it seems that links between skills development and equity are even more tenuous.

Experience in industries demonstrates that the Skills Development Act (SDA) has focussed more on the needs of employers and has largely failed as a tool to redress the apartheid legacy that taints our labour market. Under the SDA, and the associated Skills Development Levies Act (SDLA), a levy of 1% of an organisation’s salary and wage bill is paid over to training authorities. The money can be claimed back by organisations provided they develop a workplace skills plan and run training programmes according to the plans. To some extent allowing business to identify their skills needs is helpful in that it does begin to address certain aspects of skills shortages. However, leaving skills development to isolated companies does not provide for co-operative industrial strategies, it ensures reactive as opposed to pro-active skills development strategies and leaves equity issues largely off the table to be covered by employment and promotion practices. A few trends that have developed as a result of this bias have been identified below.

Under-utilisation of Skills Development Funds

A large amount of companies have not even bothered to develop Workplace Skills Plans, preferring to treat the levy as a tax. This trend seems to be worsening. For example in the CHIETA (Chemical Industries Education and Training Authority) Specialty Chemicals and Surface Coatings Chamber only 58% of the 156 companies paying the levy submitted Workplace Skills Plans in the second year since the SDA was enacted as compared with 269 companies who submitted plans in the first year.

One of the key goals of the Skills Development Act was to assist in promoting employment equity and addressing the imbalances of the past in terms of skills. However, another worrying trend that emerges is that where training is taking place it is being conducted for management and technicians, the majority of whom are white men.

CHIETA research based on Work Place Skills Plans indicates that of the legislators/senior officials/managers trained 22% were white as compared with 3% black males trained in the same discipline. 20% of technicians and associated

professionals trained were white compared with 8% black and 11% of Plant/machine operators/assemblers trained were white and 53% black. Not only does this indicate the continuation of apartheid structured workplaces, it also indicates that even in professions where black people dominate, whites are receiving proportionately more training.

Labour has identified the provision of ABET training as one of the key goals of the SDA. However, only 7% of companies, which submitted Workplace Skills Plans included ABET training in these.

It is clear that if we continue to rely on companies to decide what training is relevant and without proper measures to enforce employment equity training, the disparities of the past will continue to dominate our industries and our society.

Skills obviously play an important part in growing industries and economies as well as equitable access and distribution of wealth. Unless these and other issues are addressed, there seems to be a bleak future ahead for most.

[Mandy Moussouris is Project Manager at Naledi’s Sector