Today's Labour News

BL Premium reports that labour experts have come out in support of the Department of Employment & Labour’s (DEL’s) calls for SA’s labour legislation to be “redesigned” to allow for the speedy and cost-effective resolution of cases by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA).

The cash-strapped dispute resolution body, which processes more than 200,000 cases a year involving unfair dismissals, wage disputes and retrenchments, has had its budget of R1bn cut by R99m, with steeper cuts of R170m and R231m pencilled in over the medium term. In an advertorial penned by chief communications officer Teboho Thejane, the DEL argued that some of the solutions for the country’s labour relations lay in ensuring the CCMA was properly resourced. Thejane wrote that “redesigning” the legislation would meet the wishes of the drafters of the Labour Relations Act (LRA) that the legislation must be “easily accessible and understandable to workers”. Labour lawyer Michael Bagraim concurred: “I agree entirely with what the department is saying. When President Nelson Mandela launched the CCMA the idea was to keep it short and simple with less legalistic rules and regulations. But over the last 25 years the CCMA has become more legalistic, with parties sitting for months in arbitration, bringing legal points. I think that has bastardised the CCMA’s initial concept as envisioned by Mandela.” Bagraim said the LRA needed to be amended to deregulate the CCMA’s scope of work: “It’s time to go back to the original idea of the CCMA.” He also spoke against the budget cuts, saying they hindered the organisation from performing optimally. Labour lawyer Charles Nupen commented that there needed to be “a rethink on the priorities of the CCMA and the scope that the government sets for the CCMA through LRA.”

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Luyolo Mkentane at BusinessLive

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