There are no solutions. Only trade-offs.
~ Thomas Sowell
Do you know why the majority in South Africa hurt so much? They hurt because they do not work, which means they do not produce life quality.
Productive work is literally the antidote to the misery of poverty, crime, ignorance, disease and social strife suffered by the unemployed. And for them, labour law outlaws that antidote.~ Frans Rautenbach, Help Yourself South Africa p.122
I am launching my new book, Help Yourself South Africa at the Book Lounge in Cape Town on 21 February 2023.
A central aspect of the book is labour law and employment contracts.
Most employers complain about labour law, because it pushes up the costs of business.
Which is fair enough.
But what many people do not realise, is that the ones who really suffer under labour law, are the poor: the workers, but especially the unemployed.
And the reason, as I put it in the book, is this:
“The reason why workers in the USA get vastly more benefits than workers in, say, Namibia or Lesotho, is not because they have better labour laws protecting them. It is because they are more productive.
Take a minute to absorb that. The only source from which benefits for workers can sustainably come, is from income earned by the business.”
And labour law makes that very difficult. Which means labour must be deregulated.
But telling government that, is useless. Imagine instead if we could create a voluntary private, deregulated system under which productive jobs were created.
Chapter 6 of the book fulfils that vision: It describes how employers and employees can help themselves by concluding productive agreements that will create pockets of employment free from the constraints of labour law – a free labour market. Ordinary people will see this, get excited, and demand such a system for all. That is how we force the hand of government.
