NEDLAC MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE MEETING

31 January 2002

At its first meeting of 2003, Nedlac's Management Committee today received reports and deliberated on a number of existing and new issues on Nedlac's work programme.

The Management Committee noted that progress had been made in agreeing the broad themes for the Growth and Development Summit, which is scheduled for May this year. Nedlac is in the process of establishing task teams to take discussions forward.

Report backs on current issues included:

• progress on the Proudly South African campaign. The number of member organisations and companies now exceeds 705 and recent research on the number of people who have seen the logo showed that more than half of the people surveyed had seen the brand, whilst more than 80% of people said that they would support such a campaign;
• the National Framework Agreement on the Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS - parties reported on their progress in getting mandates;
• regulations relating to the Immigration Bill, which Government is supposed to table at Nedlac for input;
• National Commercial Ports Policy, which Government has promised to table at Nedlac once a bilateral with labour has been held;
• Nepad and the AU - a task team meeting is to be scheduled as soon as possible in order for Government to report on progress and ensure that labour, business and community are able to give input into the various processes.
• Ongoing work in the steering committee on the transformation and diversification of the Financial Sector;
• The protocol on the handling of section 77 notices - it was agreed that a period of 10 days would be given to finalise this matter;
• Co-operatives - it was agreed that a meeting of the task team on the promotion of co-operatives should be prioritised, as this was an area where there are a lot of consensus between the parties;
• Sector Summits - it was noted that meetings related to the preparation of sector summits were on hold currently, pending the release of money that has been earmarked from the Department of Trade and Industry, through an agreement with the European Union.
• Labour raised the issue of the Community Re-investment Bill, and requested that if a redrafted document was available, this should be tabled at Nedlac.