An appraisal of the revival of workplace forums and employee participation in South Africa

Abstract

The adversarial nature of labour relations in South Africa has been an artefact of the conflictual and discriminatory employment relations system which existed prior to the adoption of constitutionalism. The Ministerial Task Team, responsible for the drafting of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 envisaged a move away from adversarial labour relations, to an employment relation based on corporatism and mutual trust between organised labour and employers through the establishment of workplace forums. The envisaged objective of utilising workplace forums as a secondary channel of participation at the level of the undertaking to ensure efficiencies and legitimacy of rules and regulations binding employees at the workplace has not come to bear. The legitimacy of facilitating a secondary channel of participation at the level of the undertaking comes from a backdrop of the disintegration of orderly collective bargaining which the Labour Relations Act aims to achieve. This dissertation undertakes a comparative assessment of the operation of works councils in Germany, specifically the independence of works councils within the German labour relations system. This study argues that the adoption of majoritarianism in the employment relations framework has, over the last 24 years since the enactment of the Labour Relations Act, rendered the workplace forum a “dead duck” in the regulation of the employment relationship in South Africa. It is submitted that chapter 5 of the Labour Relations Act, regulating the establishment and operation of workplace forums, requires reform in order to facilitate a successful secondary channel of participation at plant level. This dissertation recommends that workplace forums should be revived, though collective bargaining is the preferred method of addressing terms and conditions of employment.