South Africa: Unions, Civil Society Protest Plan to Dilute Labour Rights

In a protest against the proposed dilution of labor rights in South Africa, the Campaign to Scrap the Labour Law Amendment Bills organized a demonstration on Tuesday, July 22. 

The coalition includes around 40 organizations, including trade unions, organizations of farmworkers, women, human rights activists, etc, which were represented at the demonstration outside the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC).    

Proposing sweeping “reforms” this February, NEDLAC explained in a press release, that these include: “47 amendments to the Labour Relations Act (LRA), 13 amendments to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA), two amendments to the National Minimum Wage Act (NMWA), and three amendments to the Employment Equity Act (EEA).”

“Almost all of these are disadvantageous to workers, especially the most vulnerable workers – women, youth, migrant workers, and workers on probation,” the Campaign said in its statement ahead of the demonstration.

By allowing employers to fire workers during the first three months of probation “for no reason, with no conversation, let alone a hearing”, the amendments allow employers to escape from the law deeming workers as permanent after three months of employment, explained the statement.

This will “create a massive new additional layer of unlawfully casualized workers who are hired permanently, then fired while on probation and replaced with new workers.”

Exempting businesses employing less than 50 workers from “the wages and conditions established by the Bargaining Councils” after sector-wise negotiations, it incentivizes companies to “downsize and outsource to get their staff complement below 50 so that they can pay low wages,” it added. 

The NEDLAC’s press statement in February also mentioned “a new Code of Good Practice on Dismissals”, which consolidates the previous two codes, “while making special provisions for small businesses.”

Currently, workers cannot be dismissed on charges of misdemeanor without a formal hearing. A committee must be set up with a chairperson, before whom evidence must be presented and the accused worker allowed to defend, explained Lebohang Phanyeko, one of the three elected spokespersons of this coalition. 

“The new code exempts small businesses from this requirement,” added Phanyeko, who is the national organizer of the left-wing South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), a key component of the Campaign. “This denies workers the right to properly defend themselves”, when faced with charges in small businesses, where 30% of the employed work. 

He is also worried that the ambiguous language of the Code allows “even big businesses to claim they are small. For example,” he explained, a single supermarket of Shoprite or Pick n Pay, which are among the country’s largest grocery retailers, can claim to be a small business by singling itself out from the larger retail chain. 

Such changes to the procedure of dismissals and probation particularly affect the most vulnerable section of labor, like the domestic workers, added Maggie Mthombeni, chairperson of the IZWI Domestic Workers Alliance.

While these amendments have been proposed by NEDLACK after over three years of negotiations between the government, businesses, and labor, the bulk of the voices from labor were excluded, maintains Phanyeko.

“More than 76% of the workforce is not unionized,” he explained. Within the less than 26% of the unionized workforce, a substantial portion are members of independent unions – like the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) – which are not affiliated with any of the four federations that negotiated at NEDLAC. 

These include the ruling ANC-affiliated Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the largest trade union federation in the country, alongside the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), and the Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA).

The second-largest trade union federation, SAFTU, was absent for most of the negotiations, which began in April 2022.

“SAFTU joined NEDLAC only in November 2023, and attended the first meeting in March 2024”, only to demand that the negotiation process be restarted to include voices from the excluded sections of labor.

He described NEDLAC’s response to this demand as “dubious”, adding, “They said they could not extend the process any further because they’d already spent three million rands on it – a mere three million on negotiations over amendments affecting millions and millions of workers. So we could not agree. We decided to protest and resist these amendments,” said Phanyeko.

“If SAFTU took its mandate seriously … it would have attended these negotiations,” COSATU said in a sharply worded statement this April. “Yet throughout these three years of negotiations, where meetings took place monthly, and at times weekly, SAFTU could only be bothered to attend 3 or 4 meetings,” it added.

“NEDLAC is just a forum for corruption and class collaboration,” Patrick Mlaba of the Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Centre said at the demonstration outside on Tuesday. 

“Whilst COSATU did not secure all we had sought at NEDLAC, we are confident that we have managed to ensure workers’ rights remain secure and that many critical gains advancing workers’ protections have been won,” it maintains.

NEDLAC’s proposals, submitted to the Minister of Employment and Labor, will have to be vetted by the State Law Advisor and approved by the cabinet before they are finally placed before the parliament to be voted into law. 

Although “some areas of substantial disagreement remain”, COSATU expressed confidence that “the final legislation will continue to protect workers’ rights and that such protections will be further extended.”

In the current South African legislature, the ruling coalition includes the severely weakened ANC in an alliance called the Government of National Unity with its formal rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA) – a right-wing party often accused of association with the legacy of Apartheid-era White power.

Placards calling out COSATU as a “sellout union” and labeling its parliamentary coordinator Matthew Parks as its “CEO” were seen at the demonstration outside NEDLAC on Tuesday.

This demonstration is only the first shot in the battle to resist the dilution of labor laws, Phanyeko maintains. “We will be writing to progressive political formations” in the parliament, demanding they vote against the amendments, he said. 

“Going forward, we are planning to convene public lectures and mass education programs to raise awareness about the impact of these amendments”, and hold protest actions in different provinces in the build-up to “a national general strike in the future”. 

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch