ANC Western Cape chairman Marius Fransman has accepted Solidarity's challenge to debate employment equity.
|||Cape Town - ANC Western Cape chairman Marius Fransman has accepted Solidarity’s challenge to debate employment equity.
Solidarity, along with 10 Department of Correctional Services (DCS) employees, has taken the department and Labour Minister to the Labour Court over the DCS’s employment equity plan.
The trade union believes the plan is unfair because the department’s equity targets are in line with national, and not provincial, demographics.
Solidarity called on Fransman to debate the issue.
On Thursday he agreed to do so.
“It is time we stripped naked the racism, paternalistic and patronising basis for Solidarity’s attack on employment equity,” Fransman said.
“Solidarity and other neo-conservatives such as (activist and academic) Rhoda Kadalie and the DA leadership are all using the case of the individuals in the Western Cape who have grievances, as a Trojan horse to try and end employment equity.
“They give their racist agenda away by claiming the poor service delivery is because of employment equity. In other words, black, coloured, disabled and women workers are incompetent, in their view,” he said.
In another statement, Johnny Jansen, described as the former president of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union and deputy director in the DCS and who was against the equity plan, said: “An approach whereby people are excluded from promotion purely on the grounds of their race, affects their right to dignity and equality. In this way, minorities are alienated from the political system.”
Earlier on Thursday during a break in the Labour Court case, a number of people against the equity plan stood outside the court building chanting and holding posters.
Some of the posters read: “No work for coloureds, Indians and whites in the Western Cape” and “We are people, not numbers”.
At a press conference,
Peter Marais, who was representing the Brown Empowerment Movement, set up in 2011, said the movement had been created to deal with matters such as the DCS court case.
Andre Jacobs, of the Nationalist Coloured Party, said: “It’s a huge concern, people are being marginalised.”
Cape Times