Johannesburg - Workers' rights were human rights and employers should neither fear nor resist the country's labour laws, Sipho Pityana, the labour department's director-general, said yesterday.
Pityana was speaking to hundreds of workers at Johannesburg's Library Gardens during the launch of human rights week and the celebration of the completion of the ministry of labour's five-year transformation programme in the labour arena.
Pityana said the department was proud to be part of a South Africa that no longer believed black workers were cheap labour, brought from the so-called homelands to work on the mines under extremely inhumane conditions and discarded or returned when either sick or too old to work.
"A company that seeks to underpay workers, deny them annual leave, dismiss them at short notice, will be a company with an unhappy labour force. A company with an unhappy labour force is less likely to perform well in its activities, become competitive and survive in the market place," he said.
The passage of the country's labour laws had not been the effort of government alone, but was also a product of the struggles of workers. But Pityana cautioned that the challenge was not yet over, especially in the face of a national unemployment crisis. "How do we make sure that these laws make a difference in the lives of the dismissed worker, the domestic worker, farm worker, child hawker, unskilled worker and most importantly of all, the unemployed and desperate workere"
He said the right to work was one of the most important socioeconomic rights, which was at the heart of government endeavours to alleviate poverty.