Johannesburg - Designated small and medium enterprises (SMEs) had only 10 days left to submit their employment equity reports to the labour department or face sanctions, Colin Heads, a senior consultant at Deloitte & Touche Human Capital Corporation, the human resources development consultancy, said yesterday.
Penalties would range from fines of more than R900 000 to disqualification from bidding for government tenders.
SMEs facing the December 1 deadline are those that employ between 50 and 149 people or have an annual turnover of between R2 million and R25 million.
Designated employers were required to consult with unions or representative groups of employees regarding the submission of the reports and to draw up an employment equity plan aimed at achieving reasonable progress towards workplace equity that reflected the demographics of South Africa.
Heads said it was still possible to meet the December 1 deadline if "businesses put their minds to it.
"It's possible to put a coherent report together in a few days. However, drafting and implementing the employment equity plan and adjusting the corporate culture to accommodate the changes required by the plan is likely to take much longer," he said.
So far only 60 percent of designated organisations - those employing 150 or more people - that were required to submit equity plans before a June 1 deadline, had complied, according to the Employment Equity Registry report published by the department last month.
Brian Greenstein, a labour law consultant with Andrew Levy, the labour market consultancy, said delays in the submission of the reports were caused by a variety of reasons, including uncertainty about who qualified as a "designated employer". Some employers had simply not read the legislation, while others had no intention of complying with the Employment Equity Act.
But he hoped that, as in the case of large employers in June, the department would be "fair and equitable" by extending the deadline for SMEs.
Gavin Brown, an independent labour analyst, said although delays were caused by ignorance of the law in the majority of cases, there would always be a "percentage deliberately evading the law and prepared to face the consequences".
Brown said those deliberately avoiding compliance believed the process - with all the pages of data from the department, the required analysis of staff profile in addition to bargaining council and other legislative demands - was a cumbersome administrative burden.
But Cosatu blamed the department for contributing to potential non-compliance by failing to put in place "transitional mechanisms" like a hotline telephone number or labour inspectors on standby to help organisations with the drafting of equity plans.
"It was critically important that they did that. Now when employers don't comply, the department acts as if it has been caught off guard, which is not true," said Siphiwe Mgcina, a Cosatu spokesman.
