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Putting right past wrongs

RETAIL giant Woolworths should be commended for its stance in support of equity in the workplace.

Woolies placed advertisements in newspapers earlier this week - and even took the trouble of SMS-ing customers - taking a swipe at trade union Solidarity, which has called for a boycott of the food and clothing retail chain over its employment equity policy.

Woolworths declared it was "generally progressing well towards achieving race and gender equity in the workplaces" as per its equity goals and targets.

Lest we be called names, let's declare that Sowetan is not beholden to any interests so as to blindly back any of the feuding sides without question.

Just last week we ran the story of another sector of the group's workforce complaining about what they deemed underhand tactics to sneak retrenchments through the back door.

Yet it is no secret that employment equity in SA is far from ideal, thanks to years of job reservation and repression at the hands of those that are Solidarity's natural precursors.

History is no liar and does record the 1922 strike on the Reef when white workers demanded that the colour bar be introduced in the workplace to eliminate competition from "the natives".

It was a foretaste of things to come for black workers, with apartheid turning the screws even tighter decades later.

Today the country is saddled with the challenge of undoing all the damage, and employment equity is needed to right those wrongs.

Labour Minister Mildred Oliphant this week released her department's employment equity report that reveals figures that would shame any government seeking to reverse apartheid in the workplace.

Research shows that the deployment of Africans in top managerial positions has dropped to 18.5% from 18.8% in 2007. Whites still occupy 65.4% of such positions in corporate SA. Clearly there is a need for accelerated transformation.

These are trying economic times and not the time to take the foot off the job equity accelerator if SA is to avert the danger of running an exclusionist economy in a sea of grinding poverty - the lot of the majority in this land.

Supporters of apartheid who stood to benefit most from it are the natural enemies of any corrective policy carried out today. The likes of Solidarity are fulfilling that role unashamedly.

South Africa needs a strong, fearless leadership in this regard and that's why we welcome Oliphant's rebuke of Solidarity's ill-conceived boycott.

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