Erasibo

An Egyptian anti-government protester holds a flag at Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo January 31, 2011. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

Podcast from http://marketplace.publicradio.org.

On today’s show, we talk with Jillian York from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She also writes for Global Voices Online and has been following the situation in Egypt closely.

Jillian says the idea that the entire internet was cut off was somewhat inaccurate. One internet service provider was able to stay online throughout all the protests although it’s unclear exactly why. But people have been piling on there as much as possible and also using dial up connections.

Prior to the big shutoff, protesters used all sorts of methods to lay the groundwork for the movement. There were hashtags planned on Twitter, Google Documents backups of Facebook accounts, it was all in the cloud. So by the time the internet was mostly taken down, the horse was already out of the barn.

Here are the current Wikileaks archives specifically about South Africa:

US Embassy Pretoria: http://wikileaks.za.org/origin/48_0.html
US Consulate Cape Town: http://wikileaks.za.org/origin/154_0.html

Bookmark this post (or the links) and check back for updates.

The rest of the video set is available on the Mashable website.

If you woke up feeling 2011 was going to be the year you took on the world and capitalized on the fact that you have come through the recession intact, think again if running a small business is what you do. If the Amendments to the Labour Relations, Basic Conditions of Employment, Employment Equity and Employment Services Acts come into being, you might have to seriously reconsider if it is viable to remain in business or not.

If your business model is based upon the employment of employees on a temporary or casual basis, than your business will come under attack. Ensuring that all employees, outside of much defined circumstances, will under the new Act, be forced to be made permanent. This will have drastic impacts on certain industries, especially service related industries where income and job security is linked directly to performance of employees.

Bet you didn’t factor this “unknown known” into your strategy planning.

South Africa historically has been pro-employer. Since 1994 workers have seen their rights entrenched and empowered under the South African constitution, various pieces of legislation and institutions such as the CCMA. South Africa is no longer viewed as pro-employer, however because of the rights won by workers and the high level of “labour action” these rights allow workers, South Africa is described as a country where” Cost competitiveness has been jeopardized by insider dominated wage bargaining..”

Now South Africa has a set of draft Amendments to most of the significant labour relations legislation. We want to touch on what are the implications of the Act and how will this affect your business?

The Amendments were tabled to address the undermining of general conditions of employment of workers that occurs through companies outsourcing their employment of employees via labour brokering firms.  The unions argue that labour brokering is equivalent to “a form of modern slavery” and further that in order to ensure “decent work” for South Africans, the term “decent work” needs to be synonymous with “permanent” employment and that labour brokering should be banned outright.

While, nobody wants to perpetuate “modern slavery” and surely everyone is entitled to “decent work” the Amendments being debated heatedly have high implications for the way you do business. It must be pointed out that many countries use a combination of approaches that allow fixed-term contracts to play their legitimate economic role while preventing abuse. The concern with the Amendments

Some of the key issues you should be concerned about as a business owner are:

• The amendments preclude the employment of foreigners over national citizens. If your business runs on the employment of foreign nationals, this practice will now be illegal and heavy penalties will be enforced.
• Ensuring that all fixed/temporary contracts become permanent and all employees are directly employed by a company as opposed to intermediaries, such as labour brokers, places increased risk on companies. Companies will need to seriously prioritise posts needed which will affect the number of people they will be able to hire within the confines of the required minimum wage and conditions of services.
• There is the possibility that as many  jobs could be at risk if employers chose to convert current temporary contracts to permanent ones. Coming out of an economic recession, where industry is risk averse and not confident of growth, job losses will seriously impact on the country. These job losses don’t just mean increased unemployed, it means less consumers to consume the services and good being sold by particularly small South African businesses.
• The amendments would violate the Constitution of South Africa; in that it would infringe on the right to choose a trade, occupation or profession freely. An employee could also not choose temporary employment as an option. This will have huge impacts on for instance, women, who need to work on a temporary basis to cater for the care of children and young people working informally to support themselves through university, etc
• The amendments across the Labour Relations Act (and other linked labour specific legislation) could destabilize institutions such as the CCMA and UIF by significantly increasing the workloads on these intuitions. These institutions will have to increase their capacity, which in the meantime will result in huge backlogs in unresolved cases. In addition to the cost of capacitating these organizations which will be borne by the State, businesses will have to cover the cost of maintaining employees of suspension for longer periods of time.
• If the amendments go through unchanged, your business could be faced with the situation where you need to let go of your current workforce and be fighting several claims at the CCMA.

These amendments could very well be a game changer. How does one plan to expand your business not knowing how drastically your rules will be changed? The unions need to start getting to grip with the concept of the bottom line, if there’s no bottom line there’s only the welfare line.

There are other ways of regulating this practice – that could even do away with the labour brokering all together, not that this is really a good idea to start with. Why use a stick when a carrot could work. Were no alternatives considered, such as tax breaks or quick access to business support financing, should they not be considered?

So what can you do about all of this? Should you shut up shop now fearing the worse? Don’t despair, should this amendment go through parliament it won’t come into effect immediately and there are still legal avenues for challenge, avenues that lead all the way to Constitution Hill and this probably where this fracture between business, government and the Unions will be splint.

If you are a business that makes use of temporary workers, you must start planning for the changes to the labour brokering environment that will be coming in the near future.

Questions for the media from Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen:

SACSIS and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung South Africa Office. The roundtable examined the media’s perspective of the South African economy.Other media speakers at the event included, Nic Dawes (Editor in Chief, Mail & Guardian), Alide Dasnois (Editor, Cape Times) and Reg Rumney (Head of the Centre for Economics Journalism in Africa, Rhodes University). Editors were asked to answer the following questions: Is the economy on the right growth path? What are the prospects for making it more inclusive? How does the media report on the economy? Does the media have a vision for South Africa’s economic development?

More video available from the SACSISNews’s Youtube Channel

The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) was currently looking after 16 170 kilometres of paved roads, but no gravel roads. The nine provinces, metros and the municipalities had 153 719 km of paved roads and 453 259 km of gravel roads. 140 000 km of gravel roads were un-proclaimed. The expenditure in each province for EPWP, maintenance and access roads was set out. A target was set for creation of 38 872 work opportunities, but 86 665 were achieved. In 2010 R2.2 billion was allocated for upscaling the EPWP, rising to R3.2 billion by 2012/13,

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Hi everyone,

We’ve had a technical error with our document hosting provider, so you may not be able to see all the embedded documents on the blog. We are working on the problem and will remedy this shortly.

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In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools’ dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.



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