Introduction and Background

The government, community and the leadership of organised business and labour met earlier this year to discuss how best South Africa should respond to the economic crisis. Consequently, a framework document: ‘Framework for South Africa’s Response to the International Economic Crisis’ was launched in February. This document detailed various objectives and action plans aimed at strengthening the capacity of the economy to grow and create jobs once the current crisis was over. 

For purposes of this paper, training and skills development was identified by the social partners as being an important element of the response and introduced the training layoff concept as a means to be explored as an alternative to retrenchment.

A task team was appointed (on which SEIFSA is directly represented) to undertake this investigation. In August the specific parameters and guiding principles for a national training lay-off scheme were finalised by the task team. A broad overview of this proposed training layoff scheme is set out in the document below.