Discrimination against Africans
by Claire Stewart on 19/05/08 at 6:00 am
4 comments
I got this email via Ideate:
Dear sir/madam
I fail to understand some of the employers in South Africa when they are making their advertisement on the newspapers, they will say we are looking for a female white women (EE). I was more shocked in today’s newspaper i.e. The Star, it was advertised there that they are looking for white male or indian male as HR Generalist. Is this practice acceptable in South Africa under EE and AA? For me this is discrimination against Africans.
Regards,
Fezile Yebe (Mr)
Thank you for your e-mail Fezile. Unfair discrimination and affirmative action are emotive issues and have caused their fair share of court cases both in South African and abroad! Both subjects are covered by the Employment Equity Act which was developed to address the imbalances in the workplace caused by apartheid and the various forms of discrimination- both direct and indirect. Affirmative action is defined in the Act as ‘measures designed to ensure that suitably qualified people from designated groups have equal employment opportunities…’
And as a consequence designated employers are required to set targets to increase the numbers of employees from designated groups when they employ new employees.
In your e-mail, you were concerned about posts advertised for white women, Indian males and white males. White women and Indian males both fall into the category of designated groups so its fine that they were stipulated as preferences. White men don’t form part of the designated group so it would probably be incorrect to stipulate this as a preference in employment.
I hope this addresses your concerns. Thanks for your support on our blog.
Claire Stewart is the founder of PeopleWise, an HR and Employment consulting service. Like Neo in the Matrix, Claire sees through the convoluted mess of SA employment law and makes sense of it for you, loyal Ideate reader. View more articles by Claire Stewart.
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Pride
May 28th, 2008
All this BEE is crap. It only caters for a certain group of people. What about the rest of the black population??? When they try to do something about their situation, like selling veggies on the pavements, they are terrorised by metro police. They put them in stalls, then the rent is extremely high. Then people wonder why the crime rate is so high. Whites are still better off. They are still on gravy train. Still get paid more than any other group in SA and worldwide because of their high standard of living
goddess
May 28th, 2008
Black man you are on your own.
Monique
Nov 10th, 2008
I think an ad of that nature is very rare indeed. However, it is much more common for a job advertisement to say “BEE position”. I feel that this is discrimination against white people. Why on earth do we still need BEE? It’s been 15 yrs of democracy for cying out loud! Please don’t think I’m racist, beacuse I’m not – I simply think that we should ALL have equal rights – even us white people.