On 18 December 2023 a CCMA commissioner upheld David Nemushungwa’s dismissal for having referred to his fellow employees in Zulu as “monkeys”. He conceded that he did so. Initially he said he was joking. In a second version he told…
The High Court has accepted affidavits commissioned virtually while a Commissioner of Oaths was present. The High Court accepted the definition provided in the new Shorter Oxford Dictionary which inter alia states that the phrase “in the presence of” suggests…
Fraudsters who got their jobs by faking their qualifications and experience, are being caught one by one when the employers finally, and often only after some years, verify their CVs. Two employees who faked it were given quite a drubbing…
Employers have relied on breathalyser tests for many years. When the breathalyser yielded a positive test showing that an employee was “under the influence”, that employee was often dismissed, given the employer’s zero tolerance policy. In the Samancor Chrome Ltd…
We know from the Labour Court decision in Avril Elizabeth Home for the Mentally Handicapped v CCMA that disciplinary hearings can be very informal. We also know that while line managers may have undergone some training to act as chairpersons,…
We live and work in a permissive society marked by increasingly informal dress and speech codes. Speech is often peppered with fashionable expletives, and more particularly, with the many variations of the F-word. Although conservative work structures have broken down…
There is a general perception that disciplinary codes as well as the Code of Good Practice: Dismissal, contained in Schedule 8 of the Labour Relations Act (LRA), are cast in stone and cannot be deviated from. This is not so….
The Labour Court recently handed down a judgment in the matter of Nhlanhla Christopher Makhoba and the CCMA (September 2 021) in which the Court addressed a number of interesting issues. The applicant was dismissed for having posted a racist…
SA Metal Group dismissed a cleaner when she was found guilty of “theft of company time” for having spent time ostensibly cleaning a kitchen that no one was allowed to use after the employer had implemented COVID-19 rules. A…