Give businesses incentives to employ more people.
Wages comprise 20% of my business. I've wondered if there's not a way that government can change the Tax legislation somehow to give business tax credits on salaries and wages?
* Allow businesses to claim a VAT Output credit on salaries and wages for instance.
All we have in this country is more legislation, 3% UIF (2% UIF, 1% Skills Development Levy), PAYE, VAT at every turn, plus every other scheme to squeeze more money out of businesses.
I've been registered for VAT since 1993. It kills me, every 2 months I fork out thousands on the figures my accountant calculates. It equates to millions over time, yet I don't have millions in my own bank account. SARS makes more money than me by a long shot and they do nothing for it.
They're skimming us dry in this country. For fully compliant businesses its tough out there.
We can't compete against Temu or whoever is importing cheap stuff. Online sales, door to door deliveries, you name it, retail is dying.
The double whammy since COVID is that your general customer base has become lazy, they're starting to shop more online, getting deliveries. I know people who never leave their house.
It's shocking, how things have changed, not all good either.
Mom and pop businesses are being swallowed alive, the world is going to wake up one day, if not already, to witness a corporate environment of dog-eat-dog pricing and the average Joe won't understand that they helped create that outcome. It'll be too late.
How many private bakeries, butchers or hardware stores do you see these days. Very few and if they do exist, they are inevitably good at what they do to survive.
Cosatu, whoever are asking the wrong questions. They're working top down, instead of bottom up.
Start with the businesses that do employ the majority of people in this country, informal, small and medium enterprises. Cosatu should rather encourage government to create an environment that incentivises people to want to become entrepreneurs and willingly employ more people in their businesses without fear, instead of asking for more legislation on a ship from another country that has already set sail, otherwise unemployment will remain South Africa's achilles heel. We're unfortunately destined to have huge unemployment either way, businesses aren't employing people permanently for a long time already, in fear of being saddled with rotten apples who join businesses because they need a job to pay them a wage not because they want to work.
Sorry for that little rant. I fear Cosatu and their likes are so far behind the curve they can't see the obvious and are just a useless entity making noises.
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