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Monday, 26 September 2022 14:21

EWN reports that ANC acting secretary general Paul Mashatile has written to the party’s branches – to apologise for delays to the nomination process caused by a staff go-slow.

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Tuesday, 09 June 2020 11:44

Gideon du Plessis, trade union Solidarity’s General Secretary, notes that according to Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel, around 8 million employees can return to work under Level 3. That is good news, but it also means that more employees will now have to face retrenchment processes.

The National Treasury’s conservative prediction that there may be 1,79 million job losses due to Covid-19 means that many employees will be completely unable to keep their jobs, especially in cases where a business is closing or downsizing for the sake of its survival.

However, there will be thousands of employees who will be able to keep their jobs by adopting the right approach.

Advice to employees

It is important for any employee facing retrenchment to become familiar with section 189 of the Labour Relations Act, which sets out the retrenchment process. Cognisance must be taken of the obligations employers have and of the rights employees have. It would also be expedient to have a labour law expert or a trade union on your side.

A good start to a so-called 189 process is to thoroughly analyse the initial consultation notice and clarify uncertainties and irregularities in the first instance and to then present alternatives to the employer. Questions, counter-arguments and suggestions should be submitted to the employer, preferably in writing, because then the employer must by law reply in writing.    

Affected employees and their representatives must be truly open-minded to consider any realistic alternatives to retain a job, even if it does mean reduced remuneration or a transfer. Now is the time to hang on to your job because opportunities to find another job will become increasingly remote.  

What is also important in a 189 consultation is not to manoeuvre yourself out of a retrenchment package by coming up with unrealistic demands and delaying tactics. When it comes to the latter, trade unions have in the past already made the mistake of frustrating the retrenchment process with the aim of delaying the retrenchment date, but in the meantime the companies landed up in business rescue or liquidation while the consultation process was still in progress. An employer’s sustainability must therefore always be kept in mind during a retrenchment process as there is the risk of being out on the street without a retrenchment package when a company is pushed over the edge. In certain instances, it may therefore be expedient to accept a retrenchment package at the earliest opportunity before the company goes belly-up. In more favourable circumstances a voluntary severance package should only be considered if you have another job or you are financially secure. Each decision must be well-considered and based on reliable and accurate information.

Also be wary of unethical employers. An employer can be dishonest, pleading poverty at a time when Covid-19-related retrenchments are the norm only to continue with business as usual after a convenient retrenchment process took place. Another trick employers use is to cheaply retrench all workers and to close the business, only the re-open the very same business at other premises under a different name and with employees on lower salaries without posing any historical burden to the employer

When retrenchment does strike and there is no alternative, it is essential to negotiate the best possible package that does not only include a cash payment. For example, a clause can be negotiated about a return to the workplace should a similar job become available again. Bridges should therefore not be burnt. An advantage that could sometimes be of greater value than a financial package is to negotiate for training opportunities, especially for training in transferable skills. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution in mind the acquisition of appropriate critical skills after a retrenchment will not only make you marketable, but it will also serve as a safety net in any future retrenchment process.

Also ensure that the total retrenchment package is paid prior to, or at least on the last working day, and that the employer fulfil all its obligations to enable you to claim from the UIF. The employer should also ensure the fast-tracking of pension or provident fund withdrawal payments.

It is also advisable to involve a financial expert when deciding what to do with the severance pay and in exercising retirement fund options.

In addition to the threat of retrenchment, employers are now more focused on their employees’ compliance with Covid-19 regulations and general occupational health and safety legislation.

Compliance with this legislation is important from a health point of view, but also for the sake of job protection because employees will increasingly be exposed to disciplinary processes due to non-compliance and this could result in dismissal. Employees have control over this Covid-19 threat of dismissal and should therefore always act in a responsible way.    

Under level 3 employees will have their backs to the wall, and the trauma and impact that accompany retrenchment is huge. However difficult it may be, a positive attitude after retrenchment is sometimes the difference between finding your feet again and finding yourself in a downward spiral. Where the possibility does exist, it is important to be creative and to make sacrifices to keep your job or to leave with a more favourable package. Employers, on the other hand, have an obligation towards their employees and their dependents, and our country, to see to it that retrenchment is really the last resort.          

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Monday, 10 February 2020 05:18

Bruce Whitfield writes that last year there was an almost unprecedented changing of the guard at the top of high-profile SA companies. Nearly 50 CEOs of publicly listed, state-owned and public interest companies have left their jobs over the past 14 months.

It was, in short, a talent rout, as business confidence has slumped to its worst levels since PW Botha’s Rubicon speech of 1985.

About 10% of the JSE’s 360 listed companies underwent change at the top. Some were nudged, some were pushed and others ran screaming. At least one resisted every effort to leave the corner office quietly, refusing to conform with the unwritten code of CEOs everywhere — know when your time is up.

There were breakdowns, meltdowns, a couple of retirements, some went "to spend more time with their families", and there was a worrying exodus due to emigration.

While a huge number of SA bosses vacated their positions — the highest figure since 2002 — more than 1,500 uncoupled from their high-paying jobs in the US last year too, according to headhunters Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

This suggests that being a CEO isn’t the cushy gig it’s often made out to be.

It was Absa’s Maria Ramos who kicked off 2019’s resignations; this year, it’s the turn of Tiger Brands CEO Lawrence MacDougall.

While some boards have chosen to use the opportunity to bring in CEOs with a "new broom" mandate to clean up the mess left by their predecessors, not all have chosen to use the economic downturn to properly re-engineer the firms in their care.

Tiger Brands is a case in point. FD Noel Doyle was one of two dozen executives sanctioned by Tiger as part of an ethics cleanup, after 2008’s bread price-fixing scandal.

Yet now Tiger argues, following a global search, that Doyle is the most suitable candidate.

This is a company that has yet to satisfactorily explain its link to the national listeriosis outbreak, traced to its Limpopo factory, that left more than 200 people dead in 2017/2018. There is an ongoing class action against the firm.

Doyle, who is only 53, could now conceivably spend a decade at the helm of Africa’s biggest food producer. It’s some comeback: he left Tiger after the price-fixing scandal to run Renew-it, a network of panel-beating businesses, before spending three years as boss of Nando’s SA. In 2013, he was readmitted to the Tiger Brands C-suite, where he rose to become COO, then CFO, and now he’s got MacDougall’s job.

The headlines, so far, have hardly been flattering. While Doyle has an opportunity to prove his detractors wrong, it can often be tougher for an insider to do a thorough cleanup than an outsider with no historical baggage.

Take Grant Pattison, the former CEO of Massmart, who led the strategy to save Edcon from foreclosure over Christmas 2018. He has had to be decisive in turning around SA’s largest clothing retailer, which must still demonstrate to its backers that it has the right to exist.

Pattison consolidated Boardmans into Edgars Home and Red Square into Edgars Beauty, and has just announced the sale of CNA to investment outfit Astoria.

He is a great example of a new CEO who does not have to make any apology for the actions of his predecessors. When he took to social media in January to personally intervene in a series of customer service complaints, he was able to do so without any of the baggage of the past.

"Our customer contact centre has been badly outsourced for the past several years. At the end of January it will be insourced again. We believe service levels will improve as we take control again," he said.

The same goes for EOH CEO Stephen van Coller, who assumed the leadership of the former JSE high-flyer last year.

Van Coller joined EOH out of the highly regulated banking industry via a short stint at MTN and has been able to be aggressive in the group’s cleanup. Just how high a mountain he has to climb became painfully clear this year, as EOH’s share price has shed 46%.

That also goes for Steinhoff CEO Louis du Preez, who doesn’t have to make excuses for the behaviour of Markus Jooste and his accomplices in the biggest corporate fraud in SA history, deemed by PwC after a year-long investigation to be worth around R105bn. (Unlike EOH, however, Steinhoff’s stock shot out the lights this week, soaring 55%.)

Elsewhere, Mteto Nyati has managed to convince the market that he has free rein over one of SA’s oldest listed family businesses, Altron. He has been selling off assets that may previously have been thought of as an essential part of the company legacy. Today, Altron is a smaller but more profitable business, with earnings for the six months to December growing 19%.

At Eskom, CEO André de Ruyter has, since his appointment, exhibited traits which suggest that at last the utility may have a leader able to get to grips with the fundamental issues threatening the state-owned power monopoly. Unencumbered by political aspiration or party loyalties, he may just have a fighting chance of saving Eskom. (Not all that long ago it was world-class, producing excess energy at one of the lowest rates on the planet.)

De Ruyter also doesn’t have to kowtow to the egos of his predecessors and can cut to the chase in a way an insider might find difficult.

When new CEOs are outsiders they have the space to overhaul businesses in an unemotional way.

The new Tongaat Hulett CEO, Gavin Hudson, arrived at the scandal-ridden sugar giant with an impressive CV from SABMiller. He soon instituted a forensic investigation, which led to the company’s suspension on the JSE.

That PwC investigation found that all kinds of corners had been cut and profits inflated — something that may yet lead to the prosecution of former executives, including former CEO Peter Staude.

Hudson has now convinced the JSE to lift the suspension after months of investigations.

David Constable: Cost overruns and project failures at the Lake Charles project. Picture: Robert Tshabalala

Admittedly, it hasn’t been fun: Tongaat’s share price lost 64% of its value this week as the suspension was lifted, having warned investors to prepare for significant losses.

But appointing an outsider isn’t always the right thing to do.

Take SAA, which is dealing with the legacy of hiring American businessman Coleman Andrews to run the airline two decades ago.

Notoriously, Andrews left with a R246m package. And SAA is still a wreck.

Sasol is still grappling with the cost overruns and project failures at Lake Charles in Louisiana made during the tenure of David Constable, the Canadian executive hired to take over from Pat Davies more than a decade ago.

Insiders say Davies favoured De Ruyter to succeed him, but was overruled by the board, who wanted someone with international experience.

Ideally, companies should grow talent from within. This provides continuity and, if the strategy and execution are solid, shareholders should benefit.

But perhaps the best argument is that when something goes wrong, that’s when you need a new broom. EOH, Tongaat and Steinhoff are all examples of this.

So what will Old Mutual do? The life insurer has advertised for a new CEO following its year-long court battle with Peter Moyo, who was first suspended, then fired, for failing to properly manage a complex set of fully disclosed conflicts of interest.

In an unprecedented battle, Moyo fought to win his job back, and while he might still continue to fight to be reinstated, the company is pressing ahead to find a new leader. At the moment, Iain Williamson is acting CEO — a job he’s done before. And he still may get the job on a permanent basis.

Over at Walmart, they’ve taken a different approach. Eight years after its ill-fated purchase of Massmart, Walmart finally parachuted in one of its own executives to fix the firm, which will report losses in excess of R1bn for 2019. Mitchell Slape has, so far, acted quickly, announcing the closure of DionWired and a final attempt to rescue Game. The stock has responded well so far — up 10.7%.

It’s also just good business that when strategy fails, a CEO should go. Local boards need to become more decisive on this point, using the current slowdown to recalibrate their firms.

For Ian Moir, the Scottish executive brought in to take over from Simon Susman at Woolworths a decade ago, the writing was on the wall long before his announcement in mid-January that he will make way for fresh thinking. His mistake was to buy Australian retail chain David Jones and to keep throwing money at the problem, rather than looking at it differently.

Now an outsider, former Levi’s executive Roy Bagattini, is taking over and he will have to make serious calls about the future shape and geographic spread of the company.

For others, it’s also a case of moving on to better things. SA Football Association acting CEO Russell Paul has snapped up the chance to be tournament director of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. (Though you could ask if being part of anything touched by Fifa is really better at all.)

So there are contrasting strategies adopted by SA’s largest companies to replace CEOs who are rushing for the door. In five years’ time, we’ll know which plan worked.

Read the original of the above article by Bruce Whitfield at BusinessLive (paywall access only)

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Tuesday, 03 September 2019 14:53

The Star reports that with labour organising ground shifting, rendering some unions almost obsolete, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has embarked on a process to re-align certain of its affiliates.

As a result, the federation has decided to merge the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) with the Liberated Metalworkers Union of SA (Limusa).  The merger will be finalised at NUM’s special congress, which starts on Wednesday in Durban.

Limusa was founded in November 2014, and in March 2015 it became a Cosatu affiliate to replace Numsa (the National Union of Metalworkers of SA), which was expelled from the federation in November 2014.  It was led by the late Cedric Gina, a former president of Numsa.

Livhuwani Mammburu, NUM’s national spokesperson, said the special congress was convened to finalise the work of its national congress.  Among its major tasks are issues pertaining to constitutional amendments that include the merger.

“One of the amendments is the merger of NUM with Limusa, as resolved by Cosatu,” Mammburu said.

Cosatu spokesperson Sizwe Pamla said the merger was one of the many standing resolutions of the federation.

He said there was a proposal to merge the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) with the SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu), and there was also a proposal to merge NUM with Limusa.

“Limusa was a special project which was relevant at a particular time… The politics of the time necessitated that we have Limusa,” Pamla said.

“Now Limusa competes in the sector with Numsa.  Numsa on its own is no longer a metalworkers’ union per se, it is a general union because it has realised that to survive it needs to get out of the metal sector and explore mining and other areas.  So, as a way of responding to these economic changes, the central executive committee of November 2018 took a decision that NUM and Limusa should merge,” he added.

Pamla said Cosatu always maintained it needed a few, but stronger unions, hence the re-alignment.  He admitted retrenchments had dealt blows to some unions, with the result that they were struggling to survive.

Independent political analyst Thabani Khumalo said the mergers were long overdue because many unions were “fishing from the same pond”, rendering them ineffective in the face of radical unions, such as Amcu and Numsa, which were organised in most sectors.

The original of the above report by Sihle Mavuso appeared on page 7 of The Star of 3 September 2019

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Monday, 19 August 2019 13:38

Sunday Times reports that a name on a truck is cold comfort for a Newcastle father whose firefighter son died in the Bank of Lisbon fire in Johannesburg on 5 September last year.

That, and R12,000 towards funeral costs, are all the family of Mduduzi Ndlovu, 40, have received from the city so far.

“It hurts,” said his father, Albert Ndlovu. Almost a year after Ndlovu and his colleagues Simphiwe Moropane, 28, and Khathutshelo Muedi, 37, died in the blaze, their families have not received pension and provident-fund payouts. They are also no closer to finding out why they died.

There is a glimmer of hope though. City of Joburg emergency medical services spokesperson Robert Mulaudzi said an independent report on the fire had been finalised and the families would soon be briefed. But he could not say if the report would be made public.

Ndlovu was trapped in the flames and burned to death. Muedi died when his oxygen tank was depleted and Moropane — facing a wall of fire and with no way to breathe — fell from the 23rd floor.

The fire burned for about 24 hours and the building, owned by the public works department, is likely to be demolished.

The fire also exposed the parlous state of the city’s fire service.

Muedi’s sister Johana, a firefighter for the City of Tshwane, said: “I have to walk into these burning buildings myself, knowing that is how my brother died. It’s been difficult for the whole family to deal with, his death, but I think my mom has taken it the worst. Some days she just cries.”

She said her family were not offered counselling. “We are still not okay. My mother needs it because she is really not coping at all.”

Muedi’s brother Israel said that beyond grief counselling the family wanted answers. “We are told there was an investigation and a report, but we have seen nothing.”

The city’s Mulaudzi blamed the families for the delay in payouts.

“Some relevant documentation was submitted by the three families. However, there were issues pertaining to the correct beneficiaries, which require documentation. These are legal processes,” he said.

Mulaudzi added that “continuous” counselling and support services had been provided to the relatives of the firefighters.

An initial emergency services report into the blaze, completed in January and obtained by the Sunday Times through a Promotion of Access to Information Act application, revealed that only six fire trucks were able to respond. It also found that the building had no water.

Since the blaze, the city has spent R216m to buy 40 new fire trucks that are expected to be delivered by the end of the year. At the time of the fire, the city had just six trucks. Three have since been added.

The new fire trucks will have the names of Moropane, Ndlovu and Muedi inscribed on them, but Albert Ndlovu said this was little comfort.

“For them to put my son’s name on a truck after he died will not help me in any way,” he said, insisting that neither his son’s pension nor provident fund had been paid over to the family.

The original of the above report by Jeff Wicks appeared on page 8 of Sunday Times of 18 August 2019

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