JOHANNESBURG - Road Freight Association CEO Gavin Kelly said stronger enforcement is crucial to ease tensions over foreign driver employment in South Africa’s freight sector.
With truck driver associations threatening a freight shutdown, Kelly argued the issue begins with how companies are registered and monitored.
“We are not taking the right steps when we initially register companies. When we register companies, do we ask those companies who are their employees, before we allow the company to be registered?
“We need to ask questions like are you registered with the council that is applicable to your sector of business so that we have inspectors going to all the companies that are active in that sector.
“What happens now is that inspectors to companies they are aware of and that’s the real reason we have been struggling with this. Secondly, the deterrent has to meet this problem. It doesn’t help if you get rid of these foreign nationals and they reappear or the company just employs other foreigners because that destroys the operation of the sector in totality," Kelly said.