A case in point is the Constitutional Court’s decision to legalise the private use of dagga. This has had a profound and bedevilling effect on the control of use of this mind-altering drug at the workplace.
Managers also need to get with the programme as regards the relationship between workplace safety and the use of intoxicating substances. In the case of Envers vs Barloworld (JA 86/22, 2024) the Labour Appeal Court ordered the employer to pay R1 036 794.00 in compensation for her automatically unfair dismissal due to her private use of marijuana.
The Court found that there is not an automatic connection between the private use of dagga and workplace safety. This does not mean that employees are necessarily allowed to arrive at work under the influence of dagga.
It does mean that employers now need to finetune their policies and procedures so as to focus on proving that employees who use marijuana are in fact a danger to workplace safety in each individual case before discipling dagga users.
Despite frequent court and CCMA decisions made against employers they often fail to see the importance of managerial training aimed at effective and legally complaint workplace management. We have represented countless employers taken to the CCMA and bargaining councils because a manager mishandled a shop floor grievance or disciplinary matter and the employee was unfairly dismissed.
ln some cases, because the line manager has mishandled the matter, the line manager gets fired for incurring unnecessary legal costs! The company then faces another unfair dismissal case!
Employers often lose potentially good managers this way at great cost, whereas proper training could have avoided the whole mess.
Two key factors that discourage employers from training their managers in managing the workplace in line with labour law are:
1. the financial cost of such training courses; and
2. the reluctance to take managers out of the workplace because of their vital role in ensuring workplace productivity.
A solution to this dilemma is an inexpensive labour law video series that the managers can access at intervals suitable to their busy schedules. The innovative video series WALKING THE LABOUR LAW TIGHTROPE provides this very solution.
Its 48 chapters average 10 minutes in length and can therefore easily be watched as and when the manager has time. This greatly informative yet very engaging and practical video series provides practical and user-friendly learning through the use of an animated case study that runs throughout the 48 chapters.
Each chapter contains clear and important advice needed by workplace management on the basics of labour law on a
very wide range of topics.
A further advantage is that the manager can, for a full year, easily go back to any of the 48 videos for purposes of refresher training or in order to access information on how to deal with a current workplace issue. This solves the problem of managers forgetting what they have learned.
This package helps management to walk the shaky labour law tightrope and to run the workplace productively without falling off the tightrope into the labour law abyss.
To learn more about this groundbreaking video series, WALKING THE NEW LABOUR LAW TIGHTROPE please go to www.labourlawvideos.co.za.
