PaySlipBanSA

CompComSA

Competition Commission Cheats on Policy

Custodians of the same law they flout, a cheating Competition Commission had a flimsy draft recruitment policy available for our scrutiny in 2018. Let’s take a look at the first few sections.

Policy and Praxis

There is a lack of cohesion between what CompComSA states in policy and what they do in action. 

We caught them advertising vacancies without being upfront about pay and demanding cost-to-company information from applicants.

When confronted on social media, they promptly removed the offensive adverts, replacing them with ones stating a salary range. They refused to engage with PaySlipBanSA or investigate our complaints.

Pay secrecy and unfair information advantages are actual, yet they claim to aspire to:

The realisation of Vision 2030 at the Competition Commission of South Africa (CCSA) (the “Commission”) is premised, amongst other things, on putting employees and people management at the centre of the realisation of the goals of the institution and the creation of a high-performance culture in the institution.

The Competition Commission (“Commission”) has defined the imperative of becoming a High Performance Agency as one of its Strategic Goals. The Commission has identified the attraction and retention of Talent as key to the realisation of the High Performance Agency and fulfilment of its mandate. The Commission recognises the need to contribute to the redressing of the imbalances of the past by creating opportunities for the previously disadvantaged and implementation of the Employment Equity Plan to achieve a staff profile that is representative of the demographics of South Africa.

EQUITY FUTILITY

Evidence shows that pay secrecy discourages women, CompComSA’s notion of achieving equity is incorrect and their conduct fails to match.

Policy Purpose Claims

The Competition Commission is supposed to:

  • Create a framework for the acquisition of talented employees to support the realization of the Strategic Goals of the Commission.
  • Harmonize practices and conduct in the management of talent acquisition processes.
  • Regulate the Talent Acquisition Process for fairness and objectivity.
  • To define the processes that must be followed for acquisition of talent at the Commission.
  • Outline the tools that will be used at different levels of the process.
  • To define the outputs of the talent acquisition process.

Illusion of Principles Hides Collusion

Below is Comp Con’s list of principles, note they make no mention of promoting a fair competition for talent in order to protect economic freedoms as enshrined in the Competition Act.

  • Talent Acquisition processes at the Commission must be in line with relevant legislation, policies of the Commission and acceptable norms and standards,
  • Information about opportunities and vacancies must be made available to prospective candidates with potential candidates given reasonable time to apply for opportunities.
  • All processes must be fair and objective with reasonable steps to prevent individual bias;
  • All rules and practices must be applied consistently,
  • All processes must be in line with the Commission’s Employment Equity policy and be free from unfair discrimination on the basis of gender, age, race, culture, marital status, disability or sexual orientation,
  • All criteria and techniques must be reliable, valid and relevant to the job concerned and must as far as possible reduce the potential for individual bias or discrimination.

What’s wrong with @CompComSA?

  1. Some job adverts are transparent about pay, others not. Their actions and principles are thus inconsistent.
  2. Pay secrecy is not in keeping with the Constitution, the highest law of the land.
  3. Pay secrecy discourages women.
  4. Pay secrecy allows unequal treatment and prejudice to enter the labour market value chain.
  5. Contradicting the Competition Act, the Competition Commission destroys fair competition for talent by endorsing the practice of spying on other firms compensation structures when competing for talent.
  6. The Competition Commission makes it compulsory for some of their applicants to disclose cost to company information, yet price-fixing pay is illegal.
  7. The use of information asymmetry during recruitment places the Competition Commission at an unfair advantage during wage negations.

Author

leonie hall

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