Fast-track extensive social security coverage for workers
Employment and Labor Minister T.W. Nxesi said that government plans to accelerate broad social security coverage for workers in a press release. He called for a swift policy and legislative review to address the shortcomings of the Unemployment Insurance Fund and workers’ social safety net – as exposed by the Covid 19 pandemic.
Minister Nxesi also said that the pandemic “Taught us the value of social dialogue”, adding that Nedlac played a critical role in uniting social partners in a joint response to the pandemic – in designing income relief measures and health and safety guidelines for workplaces.
Lamati said the fight against Covid19 requires joint leadership with all social partners. To date, Covid-19 has resulted in 57,000 fellow South Africans citizens dying due to the pandemic. Minister Nxesi said as part of the interventions; the government has been working with the social partners.
“We have been able to mitigate some of the effects of the pandemic and the lockouts by using our social security institutions, especially the Unemployment Insurance Fund, and working with the business community and workers to create the Covid-19 Ters benefits and build a mass network to distribute the new benefits on an unprecedented scale,” he said.
The minister said that through social security interventions through the UIF with Ters, the ministry started paying Covid-19 benefits from April 2020. The ministry had deployed its health and safety inspectors to assist the social partners in Nedlac in drafting the Covid-19 health and safety instructions and inspecting and enforcing the new regulations alongside existing health and safety regulations. Their targets were achieved with reduced budgets as the pandemic and economic development negatively affected government revenue.
Nxesi said after the department appointed 500 additional health and safety inspectors, as announced during the 2019 budget vote, their addition would be very useful in the fight against Covid-19 and allow for a quadrupling of the number of inspections planned for 2021/22.
(A copy of the full press release is available at info@middelburginfo.com)