JJ (Koos) van der Merwe, Author at Yooma

Dismissal – The importance of rules in the workplace – Part 3

Re-cap In Part 1 and Part 2, the importance and benefit of devising your own workplace rules and policies is emphasised, also introducing you to the codes of good practice annexed to the Labour relations Act (LRA), focusing on Schedule 8 – Code of Good Practice: Dismissal as the default fairness requirement for dismissals in […]

Dismissal – The importance of rules in the workplace – Part 2

Re-cap In Part 1 the importance of and rationale behind devising company-specific workplace rules and policies were accentuated. This led to the obvious question of what kind of governance (if any) would apply in case of a labour dispute situation where there are no company-specific workplace rules in place? In answering this question, Part 1 […]

Dismissal – The importance of rules in the workplace – Part 1

To rule or not to rule Is it not true that where a group of persons congregate in a certain defined space, striving towards a common goal, this common goal has the best prospect of being achieved if these people operate within a set of common rules? Furthermore, the prospect of achieving the common goal […]

Negotiated departures

Introduction In Part 3 of the three-part series dealing with the importance of rules in the workplace, I made mention of the 5 possible and legitimate ways of terminating the employment contract. To recap, these were: Disciplinary dismissal Retrenchment Incapacity termination Employment contract expired Negotiated departure In this article, I will unpack negotiated departure as […]

Disciplinary charge formulation

Introduction Following on the 3-part article regarding the importance of rules in the workplace, this article focuses on one specific aspect that has to do with the practical application of workplace rules i.e. the formulation of disciplinary charges. Importance of knowing what happened To know what happened when a workplace rule has allegedly […]

Common Sense & Fair Play

Introduction I adopted the credo “Common sense & fair play” for my labour consultancy in order to depict and encapsulate what, in my opinion, needs to define fairness in the workplace. The concept “fairness”, within this context, is not restricted to fairness towards employees, but includes fairness towards the employer as well. Admittedly, our statutory […]

Procedural & Substantive Fairness

Introduction All articles I write have one specific objective, underlying all of them and that is to make sense of industrial relations or employee relations, the latter being basically two sides of the same coin. In my former articles we touched on the importance of having rules in the workplace, disciplinary charge formulation when the […]

The Grievance Procedure

Introduction My articles up to now, dealt predominantly with the employer initiating certain actions with the employee as the object or recipient. These actions are undertaken on the strength of the managerial authority vested in the employer. The employment relationship is however in its nature an interactive phenomenon, or a “two-way street”, if […]

Sexual Harassment – Remedies & Dangers

Introduction Following on my article dealing with the grievance procedure, it makes sense to deal with a topic where the grievance procedure has a specific role to play, hence my decision to select sexual harassment in the workplace as the topic if this article. Essentially, an employee who is sexually harassed has all […]

Constructive Dismissal – An ER/IR Conundrum

Introduction I refer to constructive dismissal as a “conundrum” for a very good reason. When thinking of constructive dismissal as a concept within employment context, the following statements or descriptions ring true to this concept: “What you see is not what you get”, “It is not what it looks like”, “Resignation? – You […]