What you need to know about the new harassment rules in the workplace for South Africa
Employers need to take sterner action to stem the tide of harassment in the workplaces says Department of Employment and Labour deputy director for Employment Equity (EE) Registry, Lucia Rayner.
“Harassment must not be cheap, culprits must be held accountable and disciplined, Rayner said,” adding that employers need to have a harassment policy in place to specify the range of disciplinary sanctions that must be proportionate to the seriousness of the harassment in question.
She said sanctions must include but are not limited to: warnings to the perpetrator, dismissal, transfer of perpetrator, and encouraging the complainant to lay a criminal charge or institute civil proceedings against the alleged perpetrator.
Rayner was speaking during the joint Department of Employment and Labour and the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) 2022 Employment Equity workshop. The workshop is part of a national series of roadshows that will be held throughout the country.
The workshops are held under the theme: “Real transformation makes business sense”. Rayner was speaking to dissect the Code of Good Practice on the prevention and elimination of harassment in the workplace that was published on 18 March 2022. The code applies to all employers and employees, as provided for in the Employment Equity Act.
The objective of the workshops is to publicize the Gazetted Code of Good Practice on the elimination of and prevention of harassment in the workplace.
The EE Act states that harassment of an employee is a form of unfair discrimination and is prohibited on any one, or a combination of grounds of unfair discrimination listed in the legislation.
The Code of Good Practice is intended to address the prevention, elimination, and management of all forms of harassment that pervade the workplace.
It defines harassment to include the use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against another person or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in social injustice, economic harm, injury, death, physical and psychological harm, mal-development or deprivation.
The CCMA has jurisdiction to conciliate all workplace-related harassment disputes.
In the period 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2022 – the CCMA in terms of EE Act had referrals in terms of sex, sexual orientation, gender and sexual harassment. In 2019/2020 the CCMA dealt with a total of 1,834 disputes, in 2020/21 the cases dropped to 1,157 and in 2021/2022 there were 1,260 disputes.
CCMA Regional Senior Commissioner Letsema Mokoena said the dip in the number of disputes in 2020/21 might in the main be the result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the work-from-home phenomenon. Mokoena said with the introduction of the Code of Good Practice on the prevention and elimination of harassment in the workplace and people going back to workplaces he expects the number of disputes to pick up.
He said that there was a low number of sexual harassment referrals or a low number of unresolved workplace incidents or a low level of sexual harassment in the workplace. “Some people end up in psychiatric wards because they are afraid to report.”
Some of the reasons that make complainants remain silent include the fear to lose jobs, making the harasser angry, not being believed, being seen as trouble makers, being blamed or accused of “asking for it”, and getting the harasser into trouble, he added.
Mokoena said he hoped the code would help to develop legislation to deal with harassment.
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