The South African labour market has undergone unparalleled reformations since 1994. This textbook, up to date with all legislation at the time of writing, provides a comprehensive text for students at tertiary institutions. It should also be a useful reference for industrial relations practitioners.

"Labour Relations: A southern African perspective is the seventh edition of a text first published in 1989 under the title Labour Relations in South Africa. At that time, it was the first comprehensive textbook of its kind and was hailed as having reached the finishing line when others were still at the starting block. Since then continuous social, political and legislative developments, and the ever-changing labour relations scenario, have necessitated regular updates, as well as the more recent change to its title. Like its predecessors, this edition uses the labour 'relationship' as its starting point, guiding readers through the establishment of labour relations systems, the key participants and interactions involved and the legislation governing these interactions. It does this by using detailed practical examples, explanations and real-life cases where applicable. In various parts of this latest edition, the text touches on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the nature of changes to come and the implications for the world of work."--Publisher's description.

This edition of Industrial relations in South Africa includes new sections on termination transfers, affirmative action, conflict handling, and joint problem solving.

Labour law has traditionally aimed to protect the employee under a hierarchy built on constitutional provisions, statutory law, collective agreements at various levels, and the employment contract, in that order. However, in employment regulation in recent years, ‘flexibility’ has come to dominate the world of work – a set of policies that reshuffle the relationship among the fundamental pillars of labour law and inevitably lead to degrading the protection of employees. This book, the first-ever to consider the sources of labour law from a comparative perspective, details the ways in which the traditional hierarchy of sources has been altered, presenting an international view on major cross-cutting issues followed by fifteen country reports. The authors’ analysis of the changing hierarchy of labour law sources in the light of recent trends includes such elements as the following: the constitutional dimension of labour rights; the normative intervention by the State; the regulatory function of collective bargaining and agreements; the hierarchical organization of labour law sources and the ‘principle of favour’; the role played by case law in both common law and civil law countries; the impact of the European Economic Governance; decentralization of collective bargaining; employment conditions as key components of global competitive strategies; statutory schemes that allow employees to sign away their rights. National reports – Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States – describe the structure of labour law regulations in each legal system with emphasis on the current state of affairs. The authors, all distinguished labour law scholars in their countries, thus collectively provide a thorough and comprehensive commentary on labour law regulation and recent tendencies in national labour laws in various corners of the globe. With its definitive analysis of such crucial matters as the decentralization of collective bargaining and how individual employment contracts can deviate from collective agreements and statutory law, and its comparison of representative national labour law systems, this highly informative book will prove of inestimable value to all professionals concerned with employment relations, labour disputes, or labour market policy, especially in the context of multinational workforces.