Timeslive reports that the financial chief at Johannesburg Water, Cyrus Tavaria, was annoyed after getting a 107% performance rating at the end of 2014, but being denied a bonus‚ alongside fellow senior managers.  

He challenged the decision‚ and three years later the Labour Court has called the board’s decision to withhold Tavaria’s bonus “patently arbitrary‚ capricious and inconsistent with the remuneration policy and constitutional imperatives”.  Judge Portia Nkutha-Nkontwana said the board had no right to arbitrarily decide that only staff in the three top pay grades would not get bonuses and that it had ignored its own rules in withholding the bonuses.  The remuneration policy stipulated that up to 3.5% of annual payroll would be allocated based on each individual’s performance rating as long as the company achieved 85% of its performance target — which it did in 2014.  At an earlier CCMA hearing, the commissioner rejected the reason provided by Johannesburg Water that the senior employees were subjected to a collective punishment for the unsatisfactory organisational performance.

• Read this report by Dave Chambers in full at Timeslive

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