South Africa’s employers should prepare themselves for a spike in compensation claims as level 4 of the COVID-19 lockdown regulations allow some employees to return to work, warns DA member of Parliament and labour law expert, Michael Bagraim.
Speaking during a webinar hosted by specialist travel and logistics recruiter Lee Botti & Associates, Bagraim said there was fair reason to believe that departmental systems would buckle under the strain of employers claiming from the Workmen’s Compensation Fund (WCF).
“With people returning to work there will be protocol to follow in terms of hand sanitising and hygiene, and a lot of employers aren’t ready for it.”
In addition to basic precautionary measures, he said, many companies wouldn’t be able to do handheld temperature checking, for example.
“Thousands of people are going to get sick, claim for sick leave, and companies will have to pay the three months’ salary to employees recovering at home.”
Once companies have settled claims and paid salaries in advance, they will be able to claim from the fund.
“The problem is,” said Bagraim, “the history with Workmen’s is they don’t pay.”
On the one hand it means employees may face considerable scrutiny in proving that they got sick at work, as companies try to maintain healthy balance sheets at a time when cash flow is already under severe duress.
On the other hand, scrupulous employers with due regard for the financial wellbeing of their staff could come up against the ineptitude of the WCF, Bagraim explained.
Considering how the Department of Employment and Labour’s website and systems crashed on the first day employees with reduced salaries started claiming from the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) when the COVID-19 lockdown started, Bagraim said it was almost certain that the WCF would not cope.
“In fact I know they’re not going to cope.”
Ahead of the lockdown, he said the department was reluctant to follow advice and seek administrative assistance from the likes of the SA Revenue Service.
“The department said they were ready and would be able to cope. Well, they weren’t. Eventually they were forced to ask the South African Revenue Service to help and then we started seeing some UIF pay-outs.”
According to Bagraim, the WCF’s capacity issues and inability to cope with claims is one of the reasons why it’s been suggested that they even outsource services to the private sector.
Answering a question during the webinar on whether employees would be able to claim from their companies if they contracted the virus and were working remotely, and how this possibly might impact on the WCF, Bagraim said there was a lot that South Africa’s labour force was unprepared for.
“It’s going to leave us all in the lurch. There’s a bogeyman out there. According to statistics, there could be three to seven million retrenchments, on top of the 10 500 000 million people that are already unemployed.
“The poverty and destruction that is going to be created from the lockdown is going to create a lot more deaths than the virus and it’s time for civil society to stand up against the government. Don’t treat us like babies. This is not a police state. It’s a constitutional state.”
