Industrial relations amendments getting you down?
I sat in an IR briefing many moons ago wearing my corporate management hat and remember very clearly coming out of the session in a cold sweat and stressed after hearing a stream of legal jargon , terminology and references that should only make sense to a high court judge and not to a lowly honours graduate with a few years experience in the corporate world. I kept thinking about how on earth I was going to make my managers understand what was happening in South African labour law and worse how was I going to keep them from getting my organisation into heaps of trouble at the labour court at worst and creating a disharmonious workplace at best. So after chewing on it for a few days , I took on the task of doing my own research and dumbing it down for myself so I could make sense of things without having to be a senior labour law advocate at the labour appeal court to get by and voila I did get by and managed to swim for many years and keep my company afloat too ..yay ! Forward to 2014 and the new amendments to key pieces of labour legislation are being promulgated : employment equity , labour relations and basic conditions and what do I do ..try to cheat my way through it again by attending a seminar only to discover nothing has changed .. here stands someone sprouting sections of the law with no explanations and legalese yet again .. here we go again . This time though I'm ready already and have simplified it down and now I want to take you and your corporate ( if you want to have them join that is ! ) down the path to making sense of the amendments . If you're keen let me know . Pumani Ayer