CHAPTER 4: LITERATURE REVIEW: SOUTH AFRICAN LEGISLATIVE
4.6 Human resource management in provincial legislatures
Provincial legislatures share the same features and functions as regards their constitutional mandate. The expectation is that provincial legislature by virtue of the similarities between them in respect of the functions they perform, should learn from one another. Alternatively, have a working relationship, or shared HRM guidelines with a view to sharing employees’
expertise and knowledge.
The performance of these functions requires specialised skills, from the perspective of human resource capital. In a sense that these specialised skills are scarce in the mainstream labour market. The scarcity of these skills is because of Institutions of Higher Learning not offering them in their curriculum.
These skills include the procedural advisory services, simultaneous interpreting, the production of Hansard, translation services in official and other languages, the production of daily papers such as order papers, the setting and production of question papers and the recording of the Minutes of sittings of the Houses of Parliament, which include voting and a further variety of procedural processes.
The skills that the aforementioned functions require are difficult to find in the mainstream labour market, as has been said. To find persons who will provide a procedural and protocol advisory service to the Speaker or the Presiding Officers during debates in legislatures is difficult, and poor or incorrect advice could potentially detrimentally affect proceedings in the House or have negative consequences in general.
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This is also true with regard to simultaneous interpreting as the employees who perform this function are highly trained to interpret speeches into other languages than those that the MPs and MPLs speaks during debates. This also goes for other specialised skills, which include the various functions relating to the production of Hansard (official record of debates).
It is difficult to obtain an employee from outside a legislature who is capable of recording, transcribing, collating and producing the bound volumes of Hansard. The only place to source any of these skills is to recruit from other provincial legislatures (Parliament of RSA Language Services Section, Remuneration Task Team Report, 2012; South African Legislative Sector: Human Resource Development Strategic Framework, 2008).
It is therefore important that HRM departments of provincial legislatures are able to source these skills. However, as previously said, the sourcing of these skills is from other provincial legislatures (South African Legislative Sector: Human Resource Development Strategic Framework, 2008).
This is why the South African Legislative Sector established the HRM Forum for provincial legislatures to pave the way for cooperation (Parliament of RSA. Language Services Section, Remuneration Task Team Report, 2012). However, at the time of writing this study, the HRM Forum had not taken shape because there is no evidence from the literature that the Forum has started to function.
However, there is little or no evidence suggesting that the legislatures share human capital resources between and amongst themselves (Report of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, 2010). That is why provincial legislatures train their own employees in order that they may acquire the expected skills.
In addition, provincial legislatures with fewer resources are unable to prioritise the training and development of employees. There are too many other competing interests. There is nevertheless no guarantee that trained employees will stay in the employ of that particular legislature, as poaching is real in this sector. This shows that there is inequality amongst the different provincial legislatures (Report of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, 2010).
The differences in the application of HRM policies and practices create a number of challenges. One important problem is employees’ intention to leave their current legislature to join another legislature (job-hopping), and this leads to competition in this sector (Report of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, 2010).
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Furthermore, there are also consequences, such as employees being likely to be attracted by benefits offered by another legislature, and as a result achieving the strategic objectives of an affected legislature is hampered (Fajana, Owoyemi, Elegbede and Gbajumo-Sherriff, 2011).
Moreover, the differences in the application of HRM policies and practices limit legislatures in respect of sharing various human resource strategies, skills, ideas, knowledge and expertise in various organisational areas (South African Legislative Sector Support, 2009).
These differences in the application of HRM policies do not augur well with regard to the strengthening of employee and organisational capacity. One example of this is that each province has its own remuneration policy, namely, TCOE and salary plus benefits.
It is often difficult to attract, develop, deploy and retain the best talents at some legislatures because of these differences in the application of HRM policies and practices (Fajana et al., 2011; Parliament of RSA, Language Services Section, Remuneration Task Team Report, 2012).
Evidence shows that employees who resign from one provincial legislature do not necessarily go to a different sector, but more often than not move to another provincial legislature (South African Legislative Sector Support, 2009). A possible reason for this is that employees are familiar with the job. Differences in treatment and environment definitely influence their decision to leave the legislature in whose employ they are.
Therefore, there is a perception that the lack of cooperation between provincial legislatures results in employees being demotivated, because they tend to believe that the treatment of employees in other provincial legislatures is better with more benefits (Report of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, 2010).
Furthermore, the exacerbation of the situation is the fact that when an employee resigns from one provincial legislature to join another. In this context, an employee shall have interrupted his or her employment service. The interruption of service occurs when there is no carrying over of this employment service to another provincial legislature.
This also includes capped leave, the leave that is due to an employee. The consequence is that leave days are equivalent to a daily payment rate. However, the prevention of this situation is if there is better cooperation between and amongst provincial legislatures.
(Report of the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, 2011).
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It is not only the interruption of service that negatively affects employees, but also the burden that these employees leave behind as the functions that they had performed must be allocated to other employees until replacement is found. It takes time to fill a vacancy in provincial legislatures due to the lack of specialised skills in the mainstream labour market.
It is for this reason that it is important that employees in provincial legislatures be treated equally, in order to bring stability to this sector (Report of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, 2010; Report of the Select Committee on Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, 2011).
The integration of HRM policies and practices can address some of these challenges. These are policies such as organisational resourcing; training and development; compensations rewards and benefits; performance management; employee relations and any other practices(Report of the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, 2011) that can be integrated to harmonise the competition on talent in provincial legislatures.
This is likely to culminate in provincial legislatures’ sharing various HRM strategies, which could go as far as the sharing of skills, ideas, knowledge and expertise (Report of the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, 2011).