BL Premium reports that public sector unions told the Constitutional Court (ConCourt) on Tuesday that the government’s reneging on aspects of the 2018 wage agreement damaged the trust between it and employees.

The unions said the government’s decision not to honour the final leg of its three-year wage agreement jeopardised the bargaining process as the state could no longer be relied upon to fulfil contractual obligations it had entered into. The unions — including Nehawu, Sadtu and the PSA — approached the top court to challenge last year’s ruling by the Labour Appeal Court, which upheld a Treasury decision not to implement the final part of a three-year public-sector wage deal due to a lack of money. The unions’ legal representatives claimed on Tuesday that the government’s non-implementation of binding agreements undermined collective bargaining and set a bad precedent for the private sector. Advocate Chris Orr, for the PSA, argued that the consequence of a finding of invalidity was that the whole wage agreement “must be set aside. It cannot be that only clause 3.3 [dealing with the last year of the agreement] gets set aside”. This led to Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga interjecting: “Be careful what you wish for Mr Orr.” Advocate Timothy Bruinders, representing the government, said the state did not negotiate in bad faith with the unions, but it simply did not have money to implement the last leg of the agreement. Judgment was reserved.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Luyolo Mkentane at BusinessLive (paywall access only)
• Read too, Impasse between government and labour sets tone for a testy day at the ConCourt, at Engineering News

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