By Ofentse Mokae
03 September 2009
Skills and staff shortages are the main obstacles for service delivery at Home Affairs’ Refugee Affairs offices.
These were the words of deputy home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba while visiting the Refugee Affairs centre in Nyanga, Cape Town yesterday.
Gigaba was greeted by throngs of people queuing outside the building since early morning.
The centre receives between 1000 and 1200 people a day and this increase on Thursdays and Friday when only Zimbabwean applications are served.
Quoted in a local publication, Gigaba said numerous interventions had been made at Home Affairs but Refugee Affairs offices required a total refurbish.
“We need a change in the process, we need to deal with challenges of staff- our offices are understaffed,” said Gigaba.
He emphasised that a change to the management structure at the offices was also required along with increasing capacity at these offices to adequately deal with the numbers of refugees.
He concluded that more work was still required on the computer systems at the Refugee Affairs office because it could not cope with the challenges it faced.
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1 comment:
When you use the phrase "labor shortage" or "skills shortage" you're speaking in a sentence fragment. What you actually mean to say is: "There is a labor shortage at the salary level I'm willing to pay." That statement is the correct phrase; the complete sentence and the intellectually honest statement.
Don't speak about shortages as though they represent some absolute, readily identifiable lack of desirable services. Price is rarely accorded its proper importance in this sort of "worker/skill shortage" rhetoric.
If you start raising your wages and improving working conditions, and continue to do so, you'll solve your “shortage” and will shortly have people lining up around the block to work for you even if you need to have huge piles of steaming manure hand-scooped on a blazing summer afternoon.
Re: Shortage caused by employees retiring out of the workforce: With the majority of retirement accounts down about 50% or more, people entering retirement age are being forced to work well into their sunset years. So, you won’t be getting a worker shortage anytime soon due to retirees exiting the workforce.
Okay, fine. Some specialized jobs require training and/or certification, again, the solution is to raise your wages and improve benefits. People will self-fund their re-education so that they can enter the industry in a work-ready state. The attractive wages, working conditions and career prospects of technology during the 1980’s and 1990’s was a prime example of people’s willingness to self-fund their own career re-education.
There is never enough of any good or service to satisfy all wants or desires. The consumer must give up something to get something. The buyer must pay the market price and forego whatever else he could have for the same price. The forces of supply and demand determine these prices -- and the price of housing is no exception. The buyer can take it or leave it. However, those who choose to leave it (because of lack of funds or personal preference) must not cry shortage. The good is available at the market price. All goods and services are scarce, but scarcity and shortages are by no means synonymous. Scarcity is a regrettable and unavoidable fact.
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