Regulating Flexibility and Small Business : Revisiting the LRA and BCEA - A Response to Halton Cheadle's Concept Paper

This paper is a response, from a business perspective, to Halton Cheadle's concept paper titled 'Regulating flexibility: Revisiting the LRA and the BCEA' (DPRU Working Paper 06/109). This paper seeks to respond to each of the issues raised by Cheadle, and to his reflections on each. As previously noted, the paper has been drafted to present a business perspective. This brief presents its own difficulties. The business community in South Africa is a broad church, and encompasses manifold shades of opinion on the appropriate nature and extent of labour market regulation. What this paper attempts primarily is a review of the existing legislative and regulatory package, questioning where necessary the appropriateness of the continued application of the limits and mechanisms that are intended to promote regulated flexibility, and reviewing the balance that the existing legislation seeks to achieve. The paper does not purport to present the mandated views of organised business or any other component of the business constituency, rather than to raise for discussion general and specific issues that might be relevant to the debate initiated by Cheadle's paper