November 13, 2007
By Millicent Kgowedi
ITS Employment Equity (EE) Plan has been in place for almost seven years, and now the City is proposing a new EE Plan for the years until 2011.
The City's EE plan was initially adopted in 2001 for three years; it was then extended for another six months in 2004 and in that same year the City started reviewing its performance under the plan. It also looked at ways of improving the plan and drew up ideas to develop a new plan.
Important findings were noted in a blueprint, making the old plan a guiding document for a new plan.
"The City's Employment Equity [plan] aims to promote equal opportunities and fair treatment in employment through the elimination of unfair discrimination," said Dikeledi Molatoli, the assistant director in the City's employment equity unit, which is in the corporate and shared services department.
She explained that the Employment Equity Act requires that all employers develop employment equity plans ensuring equitable representation of people from designated groups. These groups are blacks, coloureds, Indians, women and people with disabilities. The plans should promote their advancement in terms of training and skills development, and create a friendly environment, particularly for people with disabilities.
"The plan is intended to address all barriers that may be experienced by people from designated groups caused by unfair application of human resource related policies. The plan thus contains numerical goals that an organisation must set for itself in order to address under-representation of people from designated groups," Molatoli said.
The City's Employment Equity plan aims to promote equal opportunities and fair treatment
"We are in a preparation phase of the plan. [It] has so far been presented to the executive management committee and the mayoral committee. The committees approved the plan with recommendations that numerical targets of people with disabilities must be spelled out," Molatoli said.
Her unit would present the plan, with the recommendations made by the committees, to the executive management team. It would then be presented to the council for final approval.
All stakeholders, including management and the central employment equity forum, a management and employee review structure, participated in the first phase of drawing up a new strategy - the planning stage.
It included an analysis of policies and practices, developing affirmative action measures, raising awareness, and training workshops conducted by each City department. The workshops were targeted at senior managers and employees. City leaders were also given training.
Molatoli added that having a good EE plan that all stakeholders understood and supported helped in implementing affirmative action measures. Affirmative action was aimed at balancing the jobs disadvantages experienced by people in the designated groups, in order to ensure fair representation in the workplace.
According to a report by the City's corporate and shared services department, while the old plan is based on racial and gender demographics, it has a narrow approach because it does not contain numerical goals. These must be set to deal with under-representation of the designated groups at all levels and in all occupations.
This narrow approach presents a fake picture in the sense that while organisations may report having enough employees from the designated groups, the majority of them may be at the lowest, unskilled level in the organisations. This picture does not reflect any progress in achieving EE objectives.
In the City's proposed new plan, numerical targets have been set according to the economically active population statistics of Gauteng. Employed people, unemployed people and those seeking employment constitute economically active people.
The new plan focused mainly on the top three levels and categories of the City, compared with the old plan, in which numerical targets were based on race, Molatoli said.
According to the report, there is an under presentation of black, coloured and Indian females in senior management positions. Blacks occupy only 22 percent of top management positions, while whites account for 74 percent of all employees at this level. White males make up 60,2 percent of staff in these positions, of the balance, 15,6 percent is black male, while white and black females account for 14,7 percent and 6,6 percent, respectively.
Among disabled employees, whites again dominate at 83,8 percent, with blacks making up the lowest segment at 15,1 percent. Whites continue to dominate the workplace in most departments and managerial levels.
The report states that the new EE plan will provide reasonable facilities to designated groups, in particular people with disabilities, and will work to remove stereotypes that result in discrimination against people with disabilities.
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