(‘Recapturing the Dream’ is my writing series that will explore – or, more accurately, meander through – four values and themes that are pillars of the Rainbow Nation Dream of 1994 that South Africa started pursuing at the birth of democracy. These values also form the foundation of the vision set out by our Constitution, namely redress, reconciliation, delivery and diversity. These values and themes are further echoed in significant diagnostic and analytical reports released recently, most notably the Dinokeng Scenarios report and the National Planning Commission Diagnostic Report.)
In South Africa, the discourse around redress tends to boil down commonly to four policy areas: 1) black economic empowerment (BEE), 2) affirmative action (AA) and employment equity (EE), 3) land reform and restitution, and 4) name changes. In my previous piece (http://chirproom.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/recapturing-the-dream-redress-%e2%80%93-part-1/), I looked at the first of these areas, i.e. BEE. I now turn to AA & EE.
Affirmative action and employment equity are both policy measures that primarily seek to undo the apartheid legacy of male, white dominance in the state and the business sector. The former operates as a function of selection and appointment processes when people are hired and promoted and the latter operates as a function of a business’ demographic profile, mainly with respect to race, sex and disability. The two policy tools work together to compel companies to “actively affirm” (have a positive bias towards) previously disadvantaged people in their hiring and promotion practices until the company’s demographic profile at lower, middle and higher levels is broadly representative of the general population.
As with most state policies, this is a well-intentioned intervention and, from most perspectives, a necessary one. However, the path of its implementation is riddled with pitfalls. The first of these is that the implementation of AA can easily lead to a situation where demographic factors trump merit (which I would define as a combination of knowledge, skills, qualifications and experience) in hiring and promotion practices. This is just bad business and, if we are to develop enough to beat poverty, unemployment and inequality in South Africa and beat them comprehensively, we need the business sector to be operating optimally and utilising the best skills available, not being hobbled by the need to be politically correct. Achieving demographic equity is desirable as an end but it should not be achieved by means of discarding the primacy of merit.
Another pitfall is that it can cause misdiagnosis and misattribution. For example, if a construction company has a majority of male engineers working for it, that doesn’t necessarily mean the company discriminates against female engineers in its hiring practice – it could just be that there are far fewer female engineers than male ones in the labour market. In that case, the remedial measure would be to devise and institute incentives to attract more female students to study engineering as opposed to penalising the company for failing to meet a set employment equity benchmark on the assumption that it isn’t trying hard enough to balance out the gender profile of its staff complement or is actively resisting making such changes.
With the above two pitfalls in mind, these are two thoughts I have about AA/EE:
1) The only truly fair form of AA is ‘tie-breaker affirmative action’ where demographic factors would be applied to favour a candidate in a pool of individuals of similar/the same merit. With tie-breaker AA, first the pool of candidates is narrowed down based purely on merit. If one person stands out as being clearly the best for the job, they are hired without regard to their race or sex. If the decision is not clear-cut, then demography is used to identify a frontrunner as a second filtering step. This method is the most win-win approach because: a) it’s good business practice as the person being hired would be among the most skilled people available for the post, b) there would never be any gnawing doubts about the appointed candidate’s competence because, in the first instance, they’d been assessed purely on merit and were only marginally and secondarily aided by their race or sex in the final appointment/promotion and, c) it still enables progress towards employment equity. Merit and equity are not about an either/or dichotomy – it’s a matter of both/and.
2) The way in which the level of employmeny equity is measured needs to be more nuanced than simply aiming to achieve representivity that is reflective of the general population. Current EE legislation does have the sense to make allowance for regional demographic profiles to override national ones so that in a province like the Western Cape where Coloured people make up a majority or KwaZulu-Natal where there’s a higher proportion of Indian people than their national percentage, the provincial demographics comprise the benchmark to strive for. I believe the truly accurate and fair way to benchmark EE performance is to aim for the demographic profiles of companies to be reflective of the pool of skills and talent available in a particular sector or industry. After all, if for example only 10% of chartered accounting graduates are black African, there’s no way that the percentage of black CAs working in the sector will ever reflect the national percentage of approximately 80%.
This way of looking at things will clarify the situation and help to focus the state and private sector’s attention and efforts on the supply side of the equation through education, training and skills development interventions to ensure that individuals from previously disadvantaged groups make up an increasing percentage of the pool of skills and talent from which appointments and promotions are made. In conjunction with tie-breaker affirmative action, such an approach will ensure that the primacy of merit is upheld, equity is progressively realised and the base of skills in the country is broadened and increasingly diverse.
(Recapturing the Dream: Redress – Part 3 to follow soon)
