The Beeld News Paper published an article in it’s 5 November 2019 edition regarding paternity leave and the right to claim paternity benefits from the Unemployment Benefit Fund, which may cause some confusion. The article named “Pa’s kan vir 10 dae na baba se geboorte van WVF eis” is to some extent factually wrong. This article may cause readers to assume that the rights to paternity leave in terms of the future amendments to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act via the Labour Laws Amendment...

Nowadays employees have the tendency to secretly record all internal labour matters and often employers are caught off-guard by these audio recordings submitted by accused employees as evidence during disciplinary hearings. Employers are often of the view that such evidence is inadmissible as it was either obtained unlawfully, no consent was given or they had no knowledge of the recording. Recently, the Amabhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism disputed parts of the Regulation of...

What happens when an employee becomes unable to perform their duty for reasons beyond their control?  Be it the suspension of a driver’s licence, expiration of a work visa, imprisonment, or legislation that has been promulgated rendering the employee incapable continuing their work, how does an employer deal with such a situation?  Does the employer retrench the employee based on operational requirements set out in Section 189 of the Labour Relations Act (LRA) or follow the general...

Background In the recent Labour Court matter, heard on 17/05/2019, Jacobson v Vitalab (LC) (unreported case no JS 1042/12, 25/05/19), Van Niekerk J dealt with the interpretation and the ambit of section 187 (1)(c) of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 (LRA). The matter at hand was if an individual employee can successfully rely on section 187 (1)(c) to claim that his dismissal was automatically unfair. Section 187(1)(c)  was amended in 2014 to provide that a dismissal is automatically...

Misconduct such as theft is by its very nature not easy for employers to identify, simply because it is not intended for them to find out. It is, therefore, common practice for employers to resort to trapping the employees by for instance bugging their phones, installing hidden cameras or utilizing any other method. This is an aspect that affects us all and maybe we should discuss the legal status of evidence obtained from Entrapment. Often employers get confused between the method of trapping...

Schedule 8 Item 7 of the Code of Good Practice: Dismissal (Labour Relations Act) states that to determine whether a dismissal is fair, the following needs to be considered: If the employee contravened a rule or standard regulating conduct in or of relevance to the workplace and;If a rule or standard was contravened: whether that rule or standard was valid or reasonable;the employee was aware or could reasonably be expected to have been aware of the rule or standard;the rule or standard has...

Submitting false documentation is a serious offence which warrants a hearing, sadly employers are often lost when trying to establish if medical certificates are valid and this misconduct is often overlooked. Both section 23 of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) and Rule 16 of the Ethical Guidelines from the Health Professionals Council of South Africa (HPCSA) set out requirements for medical certificates. Rule 16 states: (1) A practitioner shall only grant a certificate of illness...