Labour unions have criticised KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi for suggesting that SA’s rising unemployment rate is the result of unions constantly pushing for higher pay for their members.
The unions said on Wednesday that Mkhwanazi should not scapegoat organised labour for a crisis rooted in government policies and structural flaws inherited from apartheid.
Cosatu’s parliamentary coordinator, Matthew Parks, said that for someone of his stature, Mkhwanazi had also benefited from union protection and labour laws over the years, adding that his job was “not to speak of the law but to implement it”.
During KZN premier Thami Ntuli’s stakeholder engagement on crime prevention on Tuesday, Mkhwanazi criticised the unions for contributing to high unemployment, saying the police, for instance, were unable to hire more officers due to unions demanding salary increases for their members.
“We need to interrogate this thing. Premier, you said this country is going down in front of our eyes; the reality is that we have too many things that are wrong in our country that contribute, and labour laws are one of those,” Mkhwanazi said.
“The population of KZN is growing, but the number of police officers is going down, thanks to the unions…[because of] the labour people who say, ‘We want salaries for our members’. So the more [the] government increases salaries, the less [people] they employ and the more [unemployment there is].”
Parks rejected this, saying SA’s crisis stemmed from structural flaws inherited from apartheid.
