South Africa's railway collapse forces workers to spend half their salaries on travel

Think of another problem that has reared its ugly head. 

In South Africa today we have been very careful to ensure that we have a minimum wage, and we’ve been very careful to ensure that people are granted a certain minimum amount of time that they can work on each particular day. 

All of this is completely reversed because our railway system in South Africa has collapsed.  Employees are telling me they sometimes spend up to half their salary on travel. 

This completely negates the minimum wage.  It would have been far quicker, cheaper and far more effective if the government spent some time in fixing all the railways and enabling the staff to get to work safely, quickly and cheaply.

When I go through the labour regulatory environment, I can point out literally dozens of regulations which are meant to be doing good but in fact are doing the opposite.  We have laws and regulations structuring the amount of overtime that can be done.

This specifically put there to protect the employees.  However, employees get paid anything from one and a half times their salary to double their salary when doing overtime.  When the legislation puts a lid on those earnings, many of the factories have decided to rather outsource a part of the manufacturing process to companies abroad because they can’t get out their goods quick enough.  In a recent incident after exploring their options, the manufacturer discovered that they could move their entire manufacturing plant to a foreign jurisdiction instead of worrying about overtime. 

This led to a mass retrenchment and a restructure of the entire business.  In another rather nasty set of circumstances, a whole division of the manufacturing plant went on strike (legally).  Again, management explored alternatives and found a much cheaper and quicker way of outsourcing that part of the manufacture to China. 

This led to a dismissal for operational requirements of at least three quarters of the employees in that particular department.  In another rather sad example, employees through their union, have raised an objection to the practice of multi-tasking in the retail environment.  Experts were brought in to try and restructure that retail operation so as to mechanise and computerise the administration causing the loss of another fifty-five jobs.  All these examples rose out of our law which was brought into being in the first place to ensure fairness to the employees.  The end result has unfortunately backfired.

The Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration has always been the jewel in the crown of the Department of Employment and Labour.  Because they have done so well and because they are producing fantastic results, the labour ministry decided to put more pressure on the CCMA by regulating that the CCMA can handle all outstanding monetary disputes arising out of the employment relationship. 

These monetary disputes were run by the Department of Employment directly and unfortunately were handled shoddily from beginning to end.  The thinking was it would be better for employees if the Commissioners at the CCMA to handle those disputes directly with the same speed and efficiency that they were able to settle unfair labour practice disputes.  This new area of jurisdiction was moved across with the stroke of a pen and obviously with the hope that these disputes would take an enormous amount of pressure off the Department. 

The entire workload was moved across and has to a large degree been one of the reasons why the CCMA is starting to buckle under the pressure on the amount of disputes referred to them.  Disputes about monetary claims are effectively not a legal dispute but an accounting dispute.  Many of the trained Commissioners don’t have accounting backgrounds and are certainly not experts in the field of monetary claims.  By piling on these extra disputes, they’ve almost broken the back of the CCMA’s efficiency.

These new claims coupled with the financial pressure on the CCMA have caused a major backlog to CCMA hearings.  I’ve been dealing with arbitrations that are now over a year old.  These arbitrations have done an enormous disservice to the employees of South Africa who have had to wait for their cases to be finalised and to enable themselves to clear their names and to get any outstanding money. 

Furthermore, this has also done a disservice to the employers who might lose a case and have to reinstate an individual and give them all that back pay.  If a case was heard within two or three months, then the claim for backpay would not be so onerous.  In the meantime the Labour Department head office has had that burden taken off them but they haven’t retrenched any employees.  What was planned to be beneficial has resulted in an internal rupture to the CCMA’s ability to administer quick and faultless results. 

The same seems to be happening to the Labour Courts who do not fall under the Department of Employment and Labour but under the Department of Justice.  It sounds strange that two separate government departments would be handling and overseeing a line of dispute resolution purely because it was thought that the Labour Courts would be independent of the Department of Employment and Labour and therefore more beneficial to the employees of South Africa. 

This is not the case, and we are hearing some review applications years after the arbitration award has been made.  Again, this is distinctly a case of justice delayed is justice denied.