Labor and Industrial Relations in South Africa Term Paper by Quality Writers

This paper examines how South Africa's unique cultural, socio-economic, and political situation imposes difficult challenges for labor relations and human resource management. The paper explains that since the end of apartheid, the country has faced the problem of how to bring about substantive equality, including economic equality. The paper then looks at how the new South African government eschewed the redistribution approach, and instead opted to implement systematic and sometimes extreme forms of affirmative action. The paper also points out that a good example of the affirmative action policies the new South African government put in place is the Black Economic Empowerment initiative (BEE), which was established with the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act in 2004. The writer believes that this initiative is a good one from a human rights perspective. However, from a human resources point of view, the challenge of this situation must be that artificially speeding up the promotion of people who have been systematically denied good education for so long, creates a danger that under-qualified people will be in management positions. The paper concludes that the problem of providing adequate training for people who have for so long been excluded from management positions is likely the biggest current problem facing human resources managers, as South Africa continues to change towards becoming a normal society.