ARTICLE: DRUNK BEHIND THE WHEEL – THE EXPLOITATION OF MEDICAL INTERNS IN SA
2016-07-01
The medical profession is amongst the most altruistic of career paths. There is a commonplace understanding that becoming a doctor involves dedicating one’s life to the passion for saving the lives of others. The true extent of the dedication required is however a lesser known reality. Public health care practitioners face rigorous working hours rendered unlawfully exploitive in most other sectors. Young medical graduates bear the bulk of this burden, obliged to deal with these despotic working conditions in their two-year internship and further year of mandatory community service in order to complete their qualification.
Workers’ Day provides us with an opportunity to assess the nation’s labour relations and the degree to which our economy is succeeding in its responsibility to provide jobs for all our people – and particularly for our youth. We are confronted with the reality that, according to a recently released Statistics SA report, The Social Profile of the Youth, 2009-2014, approximately three-quarters (3.4 million) of the more than five million unemployed South Africans in 2014 were youth (aged 15–34 years). This alarming statistic requires an honest introspection into South Africa’s current modus operandi in the labour arena and calls on us to confront the failures that are crippling our ability to create an inclusive and prosperous South Africa – particularly for our young people. There are four obstacles to solving the youth unemployment crisis.
In a recent article (abridged in the Cape Times, 20 January 2014) Professor Jane Duncan pointed to the fact that although socialist ideas are widely espoused by the masses there is little reference to socialism in most of our media. She says that objective viewers “would probably conclude that socialism was consigned to the dustbin of politically bankrupt ideas long ago.”
There is something quite touching in the ANC’s belief that it can solve complex economic and social problems simply by promulgating new laws. What is not so endearing is the underlying notion that the state has a right to intrude into the legitimate affairs of private businesses, civil society organisations and political parties in its efforts to impose its ideological precepts throughout society. That has the whiff of totalitarianism‐ however benign the intentions may ostensibly be.