LABOUR LEGISLATION AND THE CHURCH

In August 1999, the Public Policy Liaison Office sponsored a workshop on recently-adopted South African labour legislation. The workshop's objectives were:

  • To familiarise SACC members with the key provisions of the new legislation;
  • To alert churches to some of the problems that may arise in interpreting the legislation, especially the difficulty of fitting clergy/church relationships into the legislation's definition of the relationship between employee and employer; and
  • To facilitiate a dialogue among churches and between the SACC and the Department of Labour on the employment status of clergy in order to clarify the appropriate application of labour legislation to churches and clergy.

The following documents, distributed during and following the workshop, are available here:

In addition, the full text of the Acts discussed at the workshop and supporting materials are available from other sites. These include:

Note: The Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the Employment Equity Act are in .PDF format. To view them you need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. An HTML version of the Employment Equity Bill is available here.

Last revised: 9 September 1999

This information is distributed by the Public Policy Liaison Office of the South African Council of Churches. The Public Policy Liaison Office monitors and analyzes key public policy issues under consideration by parliament and government ministries, alerts government to the concerns of the SACC, and assists people of faith to be more familiar with and involved in public policy debates.

Public Policy Updates are available via e-mail. To be added to or dropped from the e-mail distribution list, please write to liaison@sacc.org.za.

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