South Africa’s railway collapse forces workers to spend half their salaries on travel

Commuters face daily challenges as South Africa’s collapsing railway system forces workers to spend their hard-earned salaries on travel, highlights the writer. Think of another problem that has reared its ugly head. In South Africa today we have been very careful to ensure that we have a minimum wage, and we’ve been very careful to ensure that people are granted a certain minimum amount of time that they can work on each particular day.

All of this is completely reversed because our railway system in South Africa has collapsed. Employees are telling me they sometimes spend up to half their salary on travel. This completely negates the minimum wage.

It would have been far quicker, cheaper and far more effective if the government spent some time in fixing all the railways and enabling the staff to get to work safely, quickly and cheaply. When I go through the labour regulatory environment, I can point out literally dozens of regulations which are meant to be doing good but in fact are doing the opposite. We have laws and regulations structuring the amount of overtime that can be done.

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This specifically put there to protect the employees. However, employees get paid anything from one and a half times their salary to double their salary when doing overtime. When the legislation puts a lid on those earnings, many of the factories have decided to rather outsource a part of the manufacturing process to companies abroad because they can’t get out their goods quick enough. In a recent incident after exploring their options, the manufacturer discovered that they could move their entire manufacturing plant to a foreign jurisdiction instead of worrying about overtime.

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