 |
Welcome to GPSA. The Weekly update to life in post-apartheid South Africa. |
||
| GPSA Disclaimer | |||
| Weekly View |
 |
|
|
20 June 2011 |
This was taken from a newsletter we receive down here on the West Coast. Dear Reader, our country
is in the crapper, we have become the world’s largest welfare
state. Schussler said more South Africans received
money from welfare than from employment with 12,8 million people working -- not
all for money -- and 13,8 million people receiving welfare payments from the
proceeds of five million taxpayers and that according to a recent joint report
from the African Union and the United Nations, SA currently had the lowest adult
employment ratio in Africa. The report shows that the employment ratio
of adults in SA is only 41.4 percent compared to a ratio of 83 percent in
Uganda, 80 percent in Rwanda and 78 percent in Tanzania -- and what is more,
workers in SA only need to work for eight hours a month to be considered as
employed." Schussler said that if SA had the average
adult employment ratio of 64 percent -- similar to many average African
countries -- seven million more adults would be employed in the
country. Around one million jobs were lost during
SA's recession so the country had remained in a net job loss situation since
1994. "After 16 years of democracy, this country
has still not found the right track for creating jobs, only for protecting older
jobs and therefore creating more inequality in the
process. Now what does all this mean to you the
reader. Let’s try and explain: 1.
Over the next few months to a year the
fact that people in the age group 16 – 25 are not able to gain employment is
going to become a major political play ball. That will be used by the ANC Youth
league to win favour and become the NEW leaders in South
Africa. 2.
The occurrence of protests and crime will
become more frequent. 3.
Your company will be taxed even more by
the government and the already crippling restrictions placed on some of you will
become worse. Now many of you reading this is about now
saying to yourself what the hell if they do not want to work let them
starve. Please indulge me as I take you into that
situation, the situation many South Africans (more than 3 000 000) find
themselves in daily, for I am in a situation approximating
theirs. ·
Imagine for a moment that tomorrow you wake up and
overnight the following has happened to you. ·
You no longer have a roof over your head. ·
You and your wife have no clean clothes because you cannot
afford a simple bar of sunlight soap to wash with. ·
Your children cry and scream because for the 4th
day in a row they have neither food nor medicine for their colds. ·
You are an educated and intelligent person with many skills
to offer. ·
Every day for the past you have gone from business to
business asking for a job any job only to be rejected each time, sometimes as
many as 30 times a day. To be honest (and this is not only my view) we have a situation in South Africa with local non-white groups which have a major impact on the rest of us. They do not want to work. In townships across the country foreign business people are being threatened because they're "undercutting" prices on their shelve goods. One so-called influential representative from a township in Johannesburg went as far as to state that all prices on consumer goods should be the same across all shops - which boils down to price-fixing - which is against the law. South African workers don't like other Africans. The main reason here is that these foreigners are prepared to work. They realised the value of hard labour a long time ago and they're prepared to work for a fair price. Picked up a Zimbabwean man the other day that confirmed precisely that. The shifts at a local restaurant were shortened (which means less money in the pocket) due to fewer customers frequenting this establishment. The locals moaned and complained forgetting the fact that they at least still have a paying job. Instead of laying off staff, management discussed and implemented shorter hours / shifts. Here we're talking local brown people (not blacks). These people in the lower work catagories such as waiters, shop attendants and till operators want the big bucks without having to work. A major store in our local shopping mall have the same issue. They provide all the facilities for staff to enhance themselves and further their careers through inhouse and contracted training courses - but no, they'd rather moan and bitch about their low pay-scale instead. With Malema now in with a new term as president of the ANCYL, and pushing for land redistribution without remuneration as well as the nationalisation of mines, we don't have much to look forward to. |
|
|
If anyone out there would like to contribute to these pages, please submit your story for publishing. Send it to the webmaster at gpsa.co.za. |
