Global e-commerce giant Amazon.com is on a hiring spree in South Africa, with over 200 positions available in the country – 60 added in the last month.

The positions are largely for the group’s cloud and hosting subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), with most jobs based in Cape Town. However, positions are also available at the group’s new offices in Waterfall City, in Johannesburg.

According to Amazon’s job listings, the group is fighting for many of the same technical skills that are in high demand across several sectors in South Africa, including machine learning experts, engineers and software developers.

It is also looking for many customer service associates proficient in languages, including German, Spanish and Dutch.

Of the 214 jobs available in South Africa, 60 have been added in the last month, indicating a new push by the group to draw local talent. 148 of the available positions are in Cape Town, where AWS has had a major presence since 2004.

Some of the key positions that recently opened in Cape Town include:

• Customer service associates (in various languages)
• Senior software development engineers
• Full stack engineers
• Enterprise solutions architects
• Account managers
• Security engineers
• Machine learning engineers
• Quality assurance managers
• Data centre managers

There are fewer positions open in the smaller offices in Johannesburg, with 23 jobs available. Some of the key positions include:

• Senior software development engineers
• Enterprise solutions architects
• Account managers
• Full stack engineers

New offices

Amazon Web Services opened a new office in Johannesburg in September to support growing customer demand and continue its investment in South Africa.

The group said that the new office will support South Africa’s burgeoning cloud market, and provide a range of services to organisations of all sizes, including startups, enterprises, and public sector agencies to help them innovate, lower information technology costs, and accelerate migrations to the cloud.

Amazon first established its presence in South Africa in Cape Town in 2004. In 2017, the Amazon global network expanded to Africa through AWS Direct Connect and, in 2018, AWS launched Amazon CloudFront locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

In 2020, it further reinforced its commitment to Africa when it launched Africa (Cape Town) Region, the first AWS Infrastructure Region in South Africa.

The AWS Region enables businesses and government organisations of all sizes to create remote working platforms, build cloud applications, and store their data locally, while reaching end users across Africa with even lower latency.

South African launch

Earlier this year, it was reported that Amazon is gearing up to launch an online marketplace in South Africa as part of a global expansion.

Leaked documents seen by Business Insider global (paywalled) show the retail giant plans to expand at least five new territories, including Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Amazon’s launch plans for South Africa – codenamed ‘Project Fela’ – shows the company expects to launch its marketplace in South Africa in February 2023. This will include its own marketplace and the launch of the Prime membership programme. The country also plans to launch in Nigeria in April 2023 under the same project codename.

In January 2022, MyBroadband reported that Amazon was shopping around for warehouse space in South Africa. Amazon did not comment about its plans for the warehouses, but industry speculation suggested that it was looking to launch online shopping services.

MyBroadband learned later that Amazon secured warehouse space in South Africa and had entered discussions with courier companies and local fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailers.
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Writing in his weekly letter to the public, Ramaphosa said that South Africa’s economy and society have proven to be resilient, and they are showing encouraging signs of recovery.

He noted recent job statistics from the Stats SA Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for the second quarter of the year that reported a decline in the country’s unemployment rate.

Although only slight, the nation’s unemployment rate decreased from 34.5% in the first quarter to 33.9% in the second, a change of 0.6 percentage points.

According to the statistics, there were 648,000 more jobs filled in the first and second quarters of 2022.

Ramaphosa said this is an encouraging increase in much-needed jobs over the first half of this year. He added that the jobs were mainly created in sectors such as community and social services, trade, finance and construction.

The sectors of employment that have seen an increase indicate that the priority areas of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan – including mass public employment, economic reform and infrastructure development – impact job creation, he said.

“Economic growth cannot be realised, and jobs cannot be created without undertaking the difficult but necessary structural reforms to improve the business and investment climate. This is the government’s role,” the president said.

“However, for success to be guaranteed, we will need to forge consensus between business, labour and civil society not only on the reforms that are needed but on the trade-offs that are necessary to achieve our goals.”

While the economy takes time to recover and our reform programme is implemented, Ramaphosa said the government will continue to pursue a range of interventions to support job creation.

Such interventions will be implemented alongside measures to support private sector growth, expand public employment and ensure social protection for the country’s most vulnerable.

With infrastructure development and investment being key priorities, the growth of jobs in the construction area is particularly encouraging, he said.

Ramaphosa pointed to the following developments in the infrastructure sector as positive steps for job creation and economic upliftment:

• The Construction Industry Development Board recently noted an increase in infrastructure projects driven by state-owned enterprises like Transnet and Eskom, as well as in the metros and through the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure;
• A proposed amendment to remove the licensing threshold for electricity generation facilities and encourage investment in larger, utility-scale projects to rapidly add new generation capacity to the grid being put forward;
• Government working in partnership with various stakeholders on implementation and policy reform – since the national energy plan was announced, and;
• Since raising the licensing threshold to 100 megawatts in June 2021, more than 500 MW of private renewable power generation projects have been registered, with a pipeline of over 6,000 MW of projects at various stages of development.

“In June this year, we saw our economy return to pre-pandemic growth levels owing to a fairly positive GDP outcome in the first quarter of the year. Naturally, the objective is to move significantly off this low base, which is why we are continuing with our focus on structural reforms that drive growth,” said Ramaphosa.

He added that despite such initiatives, more needs to be done to make a significant dent in the country’s high unemployment rate.
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Original source - BusinessTech

According to the firm’s latest report on skills in demand across Africa and Asia, the financial sector alongside the insurance sector saw global interest in South Africans.

Van Niekerk said that while young people no longer want a lifelong career with a single employer, companies are also increasingly looking to harness expertise and skills as and when they need it. “This means there are more opportunities for professionals to choose what work they do, when they do it, and even where they do it,” he said.

Outsized’s Talent On-Demand Report 2022 indicates that the top 10 in-demand skills in Africa this year are in the areas of:

• Actuarial;
• Data analytics;
• Legal and regulatory;
• Programme evaluation;
• Business intelligence;
• Quantitative analysis;
• Market research;
• Accounting, and;
• Business analytics.

Van Niekerk said Outsized has seen specific growth in project-related skills (23%) such as project and programme managers, a 20% growth in demand for strategy consultants, 18% growth in demand for financial services-focused roles such as quants, actuaries and financial risk specialists – and a 17% increase in demand for tech and data-related roles such as data analytics and data architects.

He said that across its platform, the typical day rate for South Africans with these skills in the Middle East or Southeast Asia is between R5,000 ($350) and R7,500 ($450). The salaries are, however, subject to the years of experience.

Van Niekerk noted that professionals typically have at least seven to 10 years’ experience before becoming valuable as freelance resources and making the leap into the world of freelance work and consulting.

Young professionals should start planning early if they want the option of flexible work later, the talent specialist said.

“If you’re going places and thinking about building a professional career with flexibility and choice, you should have this on your radar as early as possible. Strategically build your experience by taking on a range of projects and challenges.”

Van Niekerk said that freelancers are entrepreneurs, so you must learn skills like time management, sales and marketing if you want to work freelance.

When to make the shift

Before making the leap to freelance, Van Niekerk said that graduates should spend at least a few years in permanent employment, learning and gaining as much experience and maturity as possible.

He said that spending time in formal employment also ensures credibility and is a key opportunity to save cash. “There is a cost to the freedom you get as a freelancer, in that your income can be erratic,” warned Van Niekerk.

“This means your ability to absorb financial variability is also important. If you’re preparing to become a freelancer, you should have a financial cushion. If, for example, you could save 20% of your income, you’d have a year’s income saved after five years, which would make the transition easier.”

He also recommended looking for a longer-term contract as the first move into freelance work, to gain some initial stability.

According to legal firm Webber Wentzel, the case centred on the need to distinguish between employees expressing their dissatisfaction/grievances in the workplace and conduct that amounts to a challenge of authority and willful defiance of workplace rules.

The latter, depending on the circumstances, may amount to insubordination. The case also restates employees’ rights to hold a peaceful demonstration in order to have their grievances addressed by their employers, the legal firm said.

The facts 

In June 2015, the company adopted a policy and procedure in terms of the Mine Health and Safety Act (MHSA), which, among other things, provided that high heels and open shoes were not to be worn by its employees (policy).

The policy was, however, ambiguous. It did not mention where exactly on the premises the high heels and open shoes were not allowed. There was also no full adherence to this policy, particularly at the main office complex of the mine, where the employee worked as an HR coordinator.

After one of the company’s directors spotted the employee wearing high-heeled shoes in the main office complex in September 2017, he raised the potential danger with one of the managers.

Management thereafter hastily arranged for a risk assessment to be conducted, which indicated that high-heeled shoes posed a safety risk. Employees were then instructed in a memorandum only to wear flat shoes on the mine premises and told that non-compliance with the instruction could result in disciplinary action.

A day before this memorandum was issued, the employee was again spotted wearing high-heeled shoes. She was summoned to the manager’s office and instructed to immediately comply with the policy and procedure, which she did.

She subsequently expressed her dissatisfaction to some of her colleagues, asking them to voice their dissatisfaction together, and she approached a trade union leader to support the cause.

The employee’s manager viewed her actions as a challenge to his authority and charged her with gross insubordination and incitement. She was found guilty and dismissed, and on referral to the CCMA, the CCMA commissioner agreed with the employer.

Labour court ruling

The Labour Court found that the employee’s dismissal was substantively unfair and ordered the employer to reinstate her.

“The court held that when the policy was first adopted in June 2015, there appeared to be no justification for prohibiting high-heeled shoes and the company did not specify where on the mining premises this applied,” Webber Wentzel.

“Furthermore, before the risk assessment was undertaken in September 2017 (i.e. about two years after the policy was first adopted), the rule seemed invalid and unreasonable. The justification of the rule against wearing high-heeled shoes only emerged after the risk assessment.”

On the risk assessment, the court held that the MHSA requires an employer to record the risks assessed and make them available for inspection by employees. Furthermore, the process contemplated in the MHSA, of identifying risks and/or conducting a risk assessment is subject to the principal of legality.

This means that an employee may approach a court to question the legality of the risk assessment report. The rights of an employee to question a policy and/or the risk assessment that justifies a policy are untrammelled. Employees have a constitutional right to freedom of expression, which includes expressing views about the reasonability or otherwise of any workplace rule and/or policy.

“The Court said that insubordination does not only manifest itself in refusal to obey a reasonable and lawful instruction but can also manifest in a challenge or defiance of the authority of the employer-provided the authority imposed is lawful and reasonable,” Webber Wentzel said.

The factors to be considered to establish whether misconduct amounts to insubordination are:

• The willfulness of the employee’s defiance;
• The reasonableness of the instruction defied; and
• The actions of the employer prior to the purported act of insubordination.

“Provocation by an employer is an important mitigating factor which may render dismissal inappropriate,” the firm said.

The court held that a unilateral change to a dress code is tantamount to provocation and even if the employee was insubordinate, which she was not, dismissal was inappropriate.

The court held that there was no evidence that the employee deliberately challenged the authority of her employer or willfully defied the policy and that an expression of dissatisfaction does not equate to persistence or willfulness or challenge and/or defiance of authority.

On the allegations of incitement, the court held that the finding that the employee was guilty of incitement was not justifiable on any basis.

“Incitement is a common-law criminal offence defined as the intention by words or conduct to influence the mind of another in the furtherance of committing a crime,” Webber Wentzel said.

The employee did not incite anyone to commit a crime, nor did she incite any co-worker to engage in unprotected strike action. Instead, she merely voiced her dissatisfaction and asked a few employees to join her in approaching management to plead a case for wearing high-heeled shoes, since they had worn them in the past without any difficulties.

This combined with recent interest rate hikes and weakened rand exchange rate, the ongoing load shedding issues, as well as rising fuel, food and administered prices, are putting the purchasing power of South Africans under huge pressure, the clearing house said.

As a result, low confidence levels are evident among consumers and businesses.

“Reflecting the dismal economic environment and the impact of inflation, the BTPI showed that the average nominal salary has been moderating notably from R15,570 in February to R14,600 in June 2022,” said Shergeran Naidoo, BankservAfrica’s head of stakeholder engagements.

“June is the second consecutive month that nominal salaries have remained below the R15,000 mark and 1.8% lower compared to a year ago.”

In four of the past seven months, there has been negative year-on-year growth for nominal wages. The rising inflation rate, which Stats SA reported hit a 13-year high of 7.4% for June last week, spells trouble for the average salaried worker, he said.

“Aligned with global trends, local consumer inflation increased to a 13-year high of 7.4% y/y in June, from 6.5% y/y in May, running notably ahead of wage increases in the economy and as such having a meaningful negative impact on South Africans’ purchasing power.

“This is reflected in a notable 7.8% y/y drop in the real salaries recorded in the BTPI,” said independent economist Elize Kruger.

“With consumer inflation forecasted to increase further in July, before reaching an upper turning point, more pressure can be expected on consumers and the economy at large.”

The BTPI shows more people receiving salaries compared to a year ago. After adjusting for weekly workers, the BankservAfrica data indicates that about 300,000 more salaries were paid in Q2 2022 compared to Q1 2022 (+370K new employment opportunities in Q1).

Pensions

The BankservAfrica Private Pensions Index (BPPI) showed that the average nominal private pension reached R10,000 per month for the first time, representing a 9.1% growth on a year-on-year basis, according to Naidoo. In real terms, the average real private pension was R9,673 per month, 1.5% higher than a year earlier.

Although there were monthly real declines recorded in three of the past six months, average real pensions have held up reasonably well despite rising inflation. The total take-home pay and private pensions processed in value terms increased by 4.8% in real terms and by 12.6% in nominal terms, not seasonally adjusted.

With ever-increasing pressure on the disposable income of households, consumer spending, which contributes about 63% of South Africa’s GDP, is likely to falter in the coming months.

The sources of higher inflation, specifically higher food, fuel and administered prices are still in a relentless upward trend and unlikely to abate in the short term, while the risk of second-round effects on the consumer basket is on the rise, said BankservAfrica.

Consumers will have to brace themselves for an average headline CPI of around a forecasted 7% in the second half of 2022, which will further erode purchasing power. As such, more real declines in average salaries can be expected in coming months, it said.

Keating said that despite assistance from TERS, UIF and other loan-based initiatives, increases in almost everything including fuel and imports are contributing to a rise in retrenchments as seen in the hospitality and beauty industries.

The minimum amount a person is entitled to upon retrenchment is governed by the Basic Conditions of Employment Act or certain bargaining councils that have main agreements agreeing to differing amounts, said Keating.

In terms of section 41 of the Act, an employee is entitled to one week of severance pay for every year of completed service.

Prior to retrenchment notice needs to be given. Under section 37, the notice period is:

• One week for 6 months of service or less.
• Two weeks if between 6 months and one year of service.
• Four weeks for over a year of service.

Interestingly, Keating said that if an employer does not want the employee working the notice period, they still need to pay it out. Keating said that the employer is required to pay any annual leave pay accrued to date and not yet used and other payments due until the last day of work.

The employer must further apply for tax directives for accrued payments as well as severance pay, said Keating. The employer under section 42 must also issue a certificate of service. UIF documentation also needs to be provided to employees for the to claim.

Retrenchment trends

Keating said the main reasons for which people are retrenched are for structural and economic considered ‘operational requirements, however, there is a new trend of ‘similar needs’ cases where employees are refusing to comply with vaccination policies.

Operational requirements

According to SAPA, the Labour Relations Act defines “operational requirements” to mean requirements based on the economic, technological, structural or similar needs of an employer.

Typically, operational requirements involve measures adopted by the employer to cut costs or improve profit or in order to restructure its business or alter the manner in which its employees work, to meet an operational imperative, said Keating.

In Johnson & Johnson (Pty) Ltd v CWIU [1998] 12 BLLR 1209 (LAC), the Labour Appeal Court noted that in todays world operational requirements do not always flow from the local needs of an employer but may also arise from the impact of global developments on the profitability of the parent company of South African subsidiary, said Keating.

Section 189 of the Labour Relations Act governs retrenchment or what is called dismissals based on operational requirements and places requirements on employers in terms of notices for consultation with employees as well as the actual consultations with employees, said Keating.

Similar needs of the employer

The issue of ‘similar needs of the employer’ has also received its share of attention, said Keating. She added that there have been up and coming ‘similar needs’ cases where employees are refusing to comply with vaccination policies.

In SATAWU v Khulani Fidelity Security Services (Pty) Ltd (2011) 32 ILJ 130 (LAC) the Labour Appeal Court found that an agreement requiring certain employees to undergo polygraph tests was designed for operational reasons, namely, to ensure that only people of proven integrity could be maintained in these positions. Passing such tests therefore constituted an operational requirement in respect of the affected employees, added Keating.

To sum up, in the case there was an agreement designed for operational reasons, namely, to ensure that only people of proven integrity could be maintained in certain positions, said Keating.

The positions were also known to all workers employed therein; that is, failure of the test gave rise to termination from the post as it related to an operational requirement.