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Richard Brown of Herold Gie Attorneys writes that a new judgment from the Labour Court stresses that taking a break every year is one of an employee’s fundamental rights, but reminds employees that leave not taken within six months of the relevant leave cycle would be lost without any later payout.
The judge emphasised that while an older court decision questioned whether leave not taken must be forfeited and suggested it could be accumulated instead, that view had now been convincingly rejected. Leave can’t be used by employees like “some kind of piggy bank” to store up a lucrative cash payout when they left their jobs, acting judge Sean Snyman pointed out. The case concerned car salesperson Ivan Hartley, who was head hunted by the Land Rover franchise in Umhlanga to take up the role of dealer principal. He started the new job on 1 April 2013, but five years later Hartley took his employer to court to claim to 73 days of accumulated leave. Snyman reviewed earlier decisions from the courts on the question of accumulating leave. One judgment from which he quoted at length reads that the whole purpose of the act is to “ensure that an employee takes annual leave” and that an employer may not refuse employees their “entitlement”. Allowing leave to accumulate would let both employer and employee get around the law. Snyman said though one judgment suggested that accumulated leave wouldn’t be forfeited, it was now “fairly settled” that this was not the correct approach. “Employees must know that they have to take their leave, or else they will lose it. That way, they will be motivated to enforce their rights [and] take their leave,” Snyman pointed out. For that reason he rejected Hartley’s claim.
- Read Richard Brown’s informative article in full at BusinessLive
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page