Minimum wage causing job losses – CCMA

New referrals linked to the National Minimum Wage Act will increase the labour dispute caseload by 25% this financial year, says William Thomson, acting national senior commissioner for dispute prevention and training at the CCMA. There have been 19 500 referrals so far this year in terms of the Minimum Wage Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Amendment Act, according Thomson in a Sunday Times report. The ‘jobs bloodbath’ referred to by President Cyril Ramaphosa is ‘just beginning’, he says. The CCMA, which tabled its 2018/2019 annual report last week, is coping, ‘but we are stretched’. In an effort to slow down the flood of referrals, the CCMA is being more proactive in trying to persuade employers not to cut jobs. ‘We leave no stone unturned,’ says Thomson, an attorney and academic in the field of labour dispute resolution who has been with the CCMA since 2006. He was appointed to the new position of senior commissioner for dispute prevention in July to lead the effort to save jobs. In spite of recent efforts to connect retrenchments to the technology revolution, they have ‘far more’ to do with the Minimum Wage Act combined with the dire state of the economy than the fourth industrial revolution, he says.

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