20 February 2025
The Department of Labour and Employment (DoL) will finalise consultations over South Africa’s new BEE targets by the end of February 2025 and publish two new employment equity regulations by the end of March.
This follows the new Employment Equity Amendment Act (EEAA) coming into effect on 1 January 2025.
The EEAA introduced several changes to South Africa’s black economic empowerment laws, including reducing the definition of designated employers to businesses employing more than 50 people and easing the administrative burden on small businesses.
However, one of the biggest additions was empowering the minister of employment and labour to set specific sectoral employment targets for designated employers to follow.
The DoL has drafted BEE regulations that require businesses in South Africa to employ a workforce that reflects the country’s “economically active population” (EAP), nationally or provincially.
These targets would apply across each of the 18 national economic sectors.
Broadly, the department wants all companies that employ more than 50 people to rapidly transform over the next five years and have their workforces more demographically representative.
This is especially true in top and senior management.
The orignal draft targets, published in 2023, set very specific numerical targets for the workforce across unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled and top management.
It also made a clear distinction between national and provincial EAP make-ups.
The updated draft in 2024 removed targets for the semi-skilled and unskilled levels—though still included a focus on EAP—and removed the distinction between provincial and national targets.
It also removed the distinction between specific racial groups, opting for “designated groups” in the targets.
Designated groups are defined in the Employment Equity Act as black people (Africans, Coloured, and Indians), women and people with disabilities who are citizens of South Africa by birth or descent.
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