Question NW1196 to the Minister of Employment and Labour
19 May 2021 - NW1196
Ngcobo, Mr S to ask the Minister of Employment and Labour
With regard to the Inter-Ministerial Committee co-chaired by him and the Minister of Home Affairs established in 2020, what measures have been put in place to effectively deal with issues of migration and labour since the inception of the committee?
Reply:
As the two Co-chairpersons, we have had a series of meetings with both the Technical Team and the IMC members to put together a discussion document and Action plan on policy intervention areas, short term, medium and long term measures.
We have submitted to Cabinet, policy areas that some of the IMC member department and intervention that we will be focusing on.
As for the Department of Employment and Labour, we committed to:
- participate in the joint inspections that were to be conducted in the various sectors of our economy where we received or continue to receive high presence of undocumented foreign nationals.
- Coordination of the Trucking and Road Freight Industries stand-off and ensuring the participation of the various stakeholders in the established Bargaining Council to resolve their disputes.
- To develop and present a Draft National Labour Migration Policy as a sub-theme of the broader National Employment Policy that we have been tasked to develop.
- To present Draft legislative provisions to realise proposals outlined in the Draft Policy.
We have done our part and I have instructed the Director General of the Department to convene a Technical Task Team meeting of the IMC to gather progress report from each of the member departments. We will be approaching the IMC to secure a sign-off on the second progress report that we are going to table to Cabinet somewhere in June 2021.