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The Labour Relations Amendment Bill of 2025 proposes that all employees in their first three months of employment or during a longer period of probation will not be entitled to institute any claim on the basis of an unfair dismissal.
Should the bill become law in its current form it will mean that new employees will have less protection than employees with longer service. It will also enable unscrupulous employers to include excessively long probation periods in employment contracts as a ploy to enable them to fire employees at will.
While the laudable aim of this amendment is to encourage employers to employ more employees does it make the sacrifice of new employees worthwhile?There is universal agreement that creation of employment is a top priority South Africa’s economy. It is also widely agreed that efforts to achieve high employment rates must be given priority. However, tinkering with legislation to the cost of large numbers of work seekers is neither moral nor particularly effective. Employment creation efforts must focus on the core reasons for our weak economy. And the biggest cause of our weak economy is the antipathy of the relationship between business and labour. The solution to this is not fiddling with legislation but rather the implementation of employee profit sharing schemes as a reward for improved productivity. This, together with training management on how to achieve a balance between compliance with our highly restrictive labour legislation and sustaining workplace productivity, is the solution to South Africa’s unemployment crisis.
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