MICHAEL MORRIS | National minimum wage rules need revision - Business Day

Michael Morris

I was intrigued last week to read that when Amazon introduced robots into its warehouses, rather than losing jobs it resulted in more people being employed.

This, at any rate, is the confident claim of John Boumphrey, chattily described in the news piece I read as “Amazon’s UK boss”, who is quoted as saying of concerns that robots might replace people: “Actually, the reverse happened … we ended up employing more people.”

With the robots came the need for mechatronics engineers, “people who can actually maintain the robots”. This role hadn’t existed before, and now Amazon “can’t find enough people” to do the job.

We can always count on change, on new ways of thinking about and doing things, making fresh demands and challenging our responses.

The term “mechatronics” itself reveals something of this process, having been devised by Japanese engineer Tetsuro Mori in 1969 to describe the revolutionary fusion of mechanical engineering and electronics.

The firm Mori worked for, Yaskawa Electric Corporation, is famed for its Motoman heavy-duty industrial robots. The next phase conceivably involves AI and a fresh human challenge.

What really caught my eye in the BBC’s interview with Boumphrey was his emphasis on the failures of what he called the “system” in preparing young people for work and his recommendation of mandatory work experience for over-16s because it is “transformative” in helping young people learn “things that I don’t think we teach in our curriculum but that all employers are looking for”.

Viewed through a South African lens, Britain’s official unemployment figures (rising to 5% in the three months to March from 4.9% in the three months to February) barely rank as a credible topic of conversation. But we recognise all too well the consequences of squandering the dynamism of real people responding to their world with intelligence, imagination and the will to succeed.

In her submission in March to the department of employment & labour on the Labour Laws Amendment Bill and the Labour Relations Amendment Bill, my colleague Anthea Jeffery, head of policy research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), wrote of the national minimum wage that it “prices the unskilled and inexperienced out of the labour market and is one of the main reasons youth unemployment is so high”.

For those aged 15-24, Jeffery pointed out, “the jobless rate currently stands at 62.2% on the official definition and at a staggering 71.7% on the expanded definition … Many jobless South Africans would no doubt prefer to work for less than the minimum wage — to earn R4,500 a month, say, rather than the R5,080 a month now stipulated — rather than have no income at all. But the National Minimum Wage Act prevents voluntary agreements of this kind and deprives the poor of choice.”

In a forthcoming piece, my senior colleague, IRR CEO John Endres, writes of the more than 8-million South Africans who are “looking for work and cannot find it” and the nearly 4-million more who have stopped looking: their fate has “a common cause that dabbling with national dialogues and photo-op summits won’t fix”.

That cause is South Africa’s gross fixed capital formation, “the share of national income that goes into factories, machines, roads, ports and power lines”, falling to 13.7% of GDP in 2025.

The gap between that 13.7% and the vaunted National Development Plan’s 30% target, Endres writes, “represents millions of jobs that should exist and do not”.

Giving people freedom to choose how to respond to change is South Africa’s unrealised liberation.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-05-25-michael-morris-national-minimum-wage-rules-need-revision/