News on the labour front over the recent past — and the past week — has involved ongoing infighting, death threats, an assassination and the petrol bombing of a union president’s house. Little wonder then that an important labour law development — esepcially the "three-month rule" — has gone largely unnoticed.
September 14, 2014
The labour movement is coming under increasing pressure as the global economic crisis continues to bite. Unless South African unions find a single voice, they are in danger of being further weakened.
July 27, 2012
“Then the law is an ass,” said Mr Bumble in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist when he was told that the law considered his wife to act under his direction. Few truer words have been said — or written. Because the law, that body of regulations that can shelter stupidity, pedantry, vindictiveness and sheer bloody-mindedness behind the veil of justice, is very frequently an ass.
July 27, 2012
The controversial medical parole of South Africa's former top cop, Jackie Selebi, has once again thrown into stark relief questions about kidney disease and treatment, questions that have long disturbed the labour movement. Over the years nothing has changed: it is the size of a bank balance, sometimes the level of powerful connections, that determines whether a chronically ill person lives or dies.
October 8, 2011
(First published September 23, 2011) Journalists think they are something special; that they should have more rights than other citizens and that the media somehow sees itself as above the law. These views have been expressed by a number of ANC members of parliament. They have been aired in defence of the Protection of State […]
June 17, 2011
Miners have died and thousands of dependents — wives, mothers, children and others —are suffering, many cold and hungry in the Highveld winter. They are the casualties of the ambitions of Aurora Empowerment Systems, the company that took control of the Grootvlei and Orkney mines from the bankrupt Pamodzi Gold in 2009. The promises of […]
April 19, 2015
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