COSATU and South African workers score a huge court victory over the Free Market Foundation
4 May 2016
The Congress of South African Trade Unions is pleased with the decision by the Gauteng High Court to dismiss the Free Market Foundation’s application to challenge the principle and the practice of extending bargaining councils agreements in South Africa to no non parties. In their court challenge the FMF targeted COSATU , The Minister of Labour , Bargaining Councils and other trade unions. This is huge victory for COSATU and the workers in general and we are very happy that the court dissected their application and concluded that it misses the mark and therefore has no merit.
This court’s decision has affirmed the centrality and importance of collective bargaining. If the court had entertained the FMF’s argument then all collective bargaining agreements will become irrelevant, because they will not be binding on all employers in the sector they cover. The current bargaining processes do not even dent the apartheid wage structure that remains firmly intact. Even in its current form, the collective bargaining system has failed to meet all its objectives. The number of workers covered by bargaining council agreements has been falling and more workers are covered by Sectoral Determinations than by bargaining council agreements.
The principle of extending agreements -but not rights- to non parties is provided for in Section 32 of the Labour Relations Act 1995. Since the 1995 LRA, centralisation and extension of agreements has been standard practice, where collective agreements exist.
The FMF launched its first attack after COSATU had called for the intensification of its organising and bargaining campaigns in the 2013 conference and has been threatening to challenge the constitutionality of these agreements, arguing that ‘centralised bargaining is no equivalence of collective bargaining, the two are semantically and operationally not the same.’ They have been trying to challenge both the concept and the application of Centralised Bargaining.