Just as Affirmative Action (AA) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) benefited only a handful of cadres at the expense of the masses, the increased minimum wage will, at best, benefit only a small group at the expense of millions of unemployed.
This is just another way for the ANC government to score cheap political points before the elections, without taking the destructive consequences into account.
The FF Plus is strongly opposed to a minimum wage. It runs counter to the healthy principles of a free-market system.
Compensation ought to be fair and should be based on a process of negotiation between the employer and employee, subject to experience and productivity.
Exploiting workers through starvation wages is wrong and unacceptable.
The reality of increasing the national minimum wage by 8,5% to R27,58 per hour is simply that many people will lose their jobs and consequently, the country’s unemployment rate will continue to rise.
The National Reserve Bank’s projected average inflation rate for 2024 is 5%. So clearly, an increase of 8,5% is totally exorbitant.
People with a basic monthly income, such as pensioners, will not be able to afford the increased minimum wage.
Wage earners with an average income are already struggling to make ends meet, and will increasingly have to roll up their sleeves to do housework and gardening themselves.
The result is that workers, such as domestic workers and gardeners, will be dismissed and will be unable to find jobs.
The same will most probably also happen to farm workers whose wages are standardised with the general minimum wage and no longer occur on a sectoral basis. Farmers will be forced to mechanise more and more.
The truth is that thousands of wage earners do their best to find the money to employ a domestic worker or gardener because they know these people are unemployed and they sympathise with them.
It is quite the opposite of the ANC, which is demonstrating a total lack of insight and humanity with its rash and destructive decisions.
The time has come to replace the ANC with a government that truly cares about the country’s people.
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