LETTER: Government must at least consider Nedlac’s suggestions

The nature of our government is unfortunately that almost everything is referred to commissions of inquiry, to ongoing debate, thousands of hours of consultation and never ending discussion about every issue that needs to be sorted out urgently.

The National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) spent five years debating and thrashing out the way forward for the proposed national social security fund, and again these discussions came to naught as government went ahead anyway and released a green paper that completely ignored what was agreed upon and debated at Nedlac.

This has become a common practice, as we saw with the debate about the national minimum wage and other pieces of labour legislation. Nedlac could be a useful entity within the department of employment and labour, and could justify the enormous expense of all these negotiations if only the government would at least take its suggestions into account.

Michael Bagraim
DA MP and labour spokesperson

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