08h00 Registration
09h00 Welcome, Introduction and Overview
09h15 Individual Employment Law
10h30 Tea
11h00 Collective Bargaining
12h00 Retrenchments and Restructuring
12h30 Strikes and Lock-outs
13h00 Lunch
14h00 Constitutional Law Developments, including Equality and Discrimination
15h30 Tea
15h45 Panel discussion and interaction with the audience on the year’s key developments and prospects for 2010
Presenters:
Halton Cheadle
Halton is a Professor in Public Law at the University of Cape Town and acting judge in the High Court and Labour Court. He is a director of Cheadle, Thompson & Haysom and a director of Resolve (Pty) Ltd. He is a member of the ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Standards and Recommendations and co-author of SA Constitutional Law: Bill of Rights.
Peter le Roux
Peter is a Director of Brink Cohen le Roux Inc where he practices in the field of labour law and
employee benefits law. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of South Africa. He is an editor of, and contributor to, Contemporary Labour Law and a co-author of Essential Labour Law.
Clive Thompson
Clive is a director of the consultancy CoSolve and an experienced mediator, facilitator and arbitrator. He is an adjunct Professor at the Institute of Development & Labour Law at UCT and co-author of South African Labour Law.
Topics:
- Can employment contract claims – for instance, for wrongful dismissal – be brought in the High Court notwithstanding LRA’s unfair dismissal remedies? Is there now a general common law duty of “fair dealing’ on employers in relation to their employees? There has been a flurry of lower court decisions in various directions on these points, and the pending Constitutional Court’s decision in Gcaba v Minister of Safety & Security should address matters head-on. That decision should be available in time for a thorough discussion at our seminars.
- Do you think that employers spend too much time on elaborate pre-dismissal hearings? So does one of our former presenters, André van Niekerk, now a Labour Court judge:
“The protracted disciplinary enquiry [in this case] was the antithesis of what is contemplated by the Code ... to the Labour Relations Act. The enquiry was chaired by a senior counsel, and both [parties] were represented by legal practitioners. The enquiry was conducted over a period of months, resulting in a transcript exceeding 5000 pages, and a finding comprising some 450 pages. The applicant [then] referred an unfair dismissal dispute to the CCMA ... The applicant chose to ignore the informal workplace procedures prescribed by the Code of Good Practice and to conduct a disciplinary enquiry, at great expense to the taxpayer no doubt, in a form that would make any criminal court proud. I have previously had occasion to comment on the profitable cottage industry that has developed from the application of unnecessarily complex workplace disciplinary procedures, and how inimical the actions of some practitioners, consultants, so-called trade unions and employer organisations and the various other carpetbaggers who populate this industry are in relation to the objectives underlying the LRA.” Trustees the National Bioinformatics Network Trust v Jacobson, April 2009
Our presenters will have some thoughts to share on this and more come November.