The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) said on Tuesday it will this week be writing to prominent South African corporations on the issue of race- and sex-based employment equity targets, to investigate the extent to which they drive up prices of goods and services. 

In April, the Department of Employment and Labour published the Employment Equity general administrative regulations, along with sectoral numerical targets.

The new Section 15A introduces sectoral numerical targets, which are expected to come into effect in September 2025, with IRR head of strategic communications Hermann Pretorius highlighting that intensified staff identity audits of affected entities are set to start over the coming weeks. 

The section establishes specific race- and gender-based numerical targets for businesses across four occupational levels – junior, middle, senior, and top management – within 18 industries in South Africa, to be achieved over the next five years.

Pretorius pointed out that these “cynical” quotas mean that South African companies will soon have to expend even more resources on classifying their personnel by race and sex – simply because of the racial and sexual prejudices of those in power.

“…at a time of economic stagnation locally, and turbulence globally, the Minister of Employment and Labour, Nomakhosazana Meth, has cynically seen fit to add more pressure on the remaining productive parts of the economy.” 

He highlighted that it was crucial that the costs to ordinary people of the government’s rejuvenated “pencil tests” and box-ticking were quantified.

“As such, the IRR will request prominent South African companies to confirm the necessity of annual budgeting for employment equity purposes. Crucially, we will also seek clarity from leading corporations on how much more affordable common goods and services they provide would be without their being forced to classify employees along apartheid-era lines,” he said.

He further pointed out that the fact that there were politicians in power “propping up the corpse of the Population Registration Act at the blatant cost of hard-working consumers” was appalling.

“…instead of clinging to the divisions of the past in a desperate attempt to re-racialise South African society for ideological and political ends, the government should be considering the IRR’s #NoMoreRaceLaws Bill that would finally close the chapter on coercive racial discrimination by the State.

“Just as the massive bureaucracy of apartheid came at the cost of ordinary people, the sustained post-1994 obsession with race continues to impose costs that make life in South Africa unnecessarily expensive. Every product and service delivered to every South African consumer is being made more expensive by the racial fantasies of those in power. It is obscene. And it must be called out, exposed, and ended,” explained Pretorius.

He said having to jump through racial administrative hoops to audit staff contingents numbering up to the thousands was not a cost-free exercise.

He further noted that every rand spent on these measures and the subsequent job-destroying process of trying to meet the new toxic quotas would ultimately register as a cost to be paid by South African consumers.

He noted that these policies made all South Africans poorer – except perhaps for an elite few who benefited from the shameless commodification of race and sex.

“At a time when hard-working South Africans cannot afford it, the Minister is insisting on adding unnecessary and unproductive costs to goods and services ordinary consumers rely on,” he added.

He claimed that the racial categories contained in the employment equity quotas perfectly mirrored those of the Population Registration Act, the cornerstone law of the entire Apartheid system.

He said far from providing a route away from the injustices and failures of apartheid, race-based employment equity targets were “blatantly regressive, ignoring the repeal of the Act in 1991”.