Labour Vanguard

minimum wage hearings held off to January

PUBLIC hearings on a national minimum wage are expected to resume in January, with an intention to hold them in all provinces possibly before the state of the nation address in February.

Parliament’s portfolio committee on labour has expressed satisfaction with the rate of progress of the hearings. But it has postponed a hearing that was scheduled to take place on Friday in Free State province.

Parliament had its final sitting of the year on Thursday and the hearings will not continue while it is in recess. But the portfolio committee will press for conclusion of the hearings in all nine provinces by early next year.

Parliament’s process complements the one Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa is leading in the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac). He announced earlier this month that he would lead a committee of Nedlac constituents that would report back on the technical modalities of a national minimum wage by July next year.

"Both processes will inform whatever decision (Parliament’s portfolio committee on labour) arrives at," the committee’s chairwoman, Lumka Yengeni, said in a statement this week.

Throughout the week MPs conducted hearings in North West. Views of mine workers were canvassed and the submissions received included one that called for a national minimum wage of between R8,500 and R9,500 a month in the mining sector.

The North West hearings followed those in Gauteng and Western Cape earlier this month. These primarily sought to establish the views of domestic and farm workers — the two categories in which wages may have to fall below any nationally set minimum wage and rely on the existing system of sectoral determinations.

The public hearings on the minimum wage follow several submissions made to Parliament by interest groups on the issue. Among those are bodies in the agricultural sector, which have warned that a minimum wage could worsen an existing trend of mechanisation.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions in North West said on Thursday it had submitted that vulnerable workers — including domestic and farm workers, and those in expanded public works programmes — be paid between R5,500 and R7,000.