Use Apartheid Legislation to Classify Your Employees, Government Says

The government has told employers to rely on apartheid-era racial laws when classifying their staff by race, instructing them to use the 1950 Population Registration Act as a guide.

This emerges from a letter, seen by The Common Sense, sent earlier this month by the Department of Employment and Labour to Gerhard Papenfus of the National Employers Association of South Africa. Papenfus had asked the department how firms were expected to racially classify employees in order to adhere to employment equity regulations.

In its written response, the department said employers must use the definitions of designated groups in the Employment Equity Act read together with “historical racial classification legislation” such as the Population Registration Act.

That Act was central to apartheid rule. It compelled every person in South Africa to be entered on a central population register and assigned to a fixed racial category. Where people could live, work, study, and what rights they enjoyed flowed from that classification. The law was repealed in 1991 as the apartheid system was dismantled.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has condemned the department’s stance. Michael Bagraim, the party’s labour spokesperson, said the instruction “is as shocking as it is unlawful” and called the Population Registration Act “the law that separated families, dictated where people could live, and laid the foundation for every other piece of apartheid discrimination,” adding that reviving it in any form is “nothing short of an assault on the dignity and equality of every person in this country”.

On X, the minister of home affairs and DA MP Leon Schreiber said the Population Registration Act, “the cornerstone of formal apartheid,” was scrapped in 1991 and replaced by a non-racial population register and ID system. He added that “the legislated evil of the Population Registration Act has not been replaced by any new law reintroducing mandatory racial classification, which undergirded abominations like the pencil test and job reservation”.

The DA has said that it is exploring legal action to block the department’s instruction.