Description
Perhaps the most prominent representation of the welfare challenges facing post-apartheid South Africa, is the economy’s unemployment rate. Hence, this is an economy although formally categorised as an upper middle income country, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world – officially at 26.7 per cent and 38.8 per cent when discouraged workers are included. This characteristic, more than any other, has placed market regulation high on the agenda of pertinent policy issues in South Africa. A combination of the intrinsic nature of these issues and the fact that the society is characterised by strong, vocal trade unions and employer associations – has meant that changes to the regulatory
and institutional framework is a highly contested policy issue in South Africa.
This paper, in trying to mature the debate on labour regulation and worker protection, has two key objectives. Firstly, we attempt to provide more nuanced and empirically-based measures of labour regulation and worker protection for South Africa, within an international comparative context. Secondly, we attempt a legal overview of some of the key legislative and institutional challenges that exist within the South African labour market. In many ways
the latter is a non-technical synthesis of key legislative and institutional reform suggestions which have arisen out of recent policy discussions within the country. Indeed, one of the more modest attempts within this paper is to merge the economic and legal analyses of the South African labour market. This, as we will illustrate below, remains essential in order to add value to ongoing and at times vociferous debates,
