Today's Labour News

Business Times reports that SA’s new private-sector umbrella group formed to fight Covid-19 has been in daily talks with the government over reopening the economy and is urging it to move quickly to lockdown level 2.  

Business for SA (B4SA) is proposing that companies, in partnership with labour, can take charge of implementing stringent health and safety controls and monitoring in the workplace to ensure the spread of the virus is controlled.  It has told government that the current approach is economically impractical and hard to regulate, and that this could have dire socioeconomic and health consequences.  This comes as April data show the devastating impact of the first full month of the lockdown, during which many sectors ground to a halt, a growing number of jobs and businesses teetered on the brink and tax collections plummeted.  Last week, B4SA urged the cabinet to accelerate the risk-adjusted easing of the lockdown.  B4SA's modelling indicates that the move to level 4 will not materially improve economic outcomes because even in the best-case scenario the proportion of the workforce returning to work will no more than double from the 27% active under level 5.  And if level 4 continued for a month, with a gradual move to lower levels, the economy would contract 14.5% in 2020.  However, a quick move to level 2 would reduce the contraction to 10% and cut the number of formal sector jobs at risk from 2-million to below half that number.  At level 2, 97% of the workforce would be allowed to work.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Hilary Joffe at BusinessLive
• Read too, South Africa might take three years to recover from pandemic, forecast predicts, at Business Report

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