Injured workers

A new broom is about to be introduced to the scene at the labour department. It will come in the shape of the successor to director-general (DG) Rams Ramashia. As such, I feel compelled to draw his or her attention to a number of matters and people. Many of these names and issues will, in any event, soon be arriving on the DG's desk in the form of class action court papers. The papers concern people such as the Cape Town widow whose husband fell to his death in the Table Bay shipyard in 1994; a Pretoria baker's delivery man who is now a paraplegic after being shot four years ago while delivering bread; and an Eastern Cape engineering worker who is missing a hand. All have two things in common: they were killed or injured at work years ago and neither they nor their families have received any compensation. All of them should have been paid out long ago by the Workmen's Compensation Fund, which was recently advertised widely on television and radio. The advertisements, featuring then labour department spokesperson Snuki Zikalala, undoubtedly helped to spread awareness of the existence of the fund and the Compensation Commission.

The probable result is that many more injured workers, or the families of those who have been killed at work, are now making claims. However, many employers are still not registered with the fund and others simply do not complete the required employer reports. Such claims are brought to the commission by workers alone and go straight into the T (for temporary) file. The idea behind this is a good one: separate the cases that need to be followed up, almost always to obtain a report on the incident from the employer. But, almost without exception, these cases are not followed up. The T file has become a dumping ground where the misery of thousands of workers and their families lies buried. According to the commission's annual report in 1998, there were 30 000 such cases at the time. Until last year no further mention of them was made. The 2003 report merely noted that 14 000 claims without employer reports had been made over the previous year. Nobody seems to know for sure how many T files now moulder in the commission's offices. Estimates by labour lawyers and others involved with the system range from at least 40 000 to as high as 250 000. This is the basis of the court action being brought by the Pretoria Legal Resources Centre. After months - in some cases years - of trying to get some action or even explanation about the status of these claims, the centre is off to court. The new DG will probably learn a great deal about the enormous task ahead from the evidence presented in court. But there are other very good sources that could provide indications of the best way to proceed.

The new DG could start by reading through the report of the administrative review conducted within the commission last year. It does not apparently deal with the T file issue, since the consultancy that carried out the review was not told about it. The consultants will not comment or even admit to having carried out the review, but details of the report's contents have leaked. Like an earlier assessment by another group of consultants, this study also found problems with the peculiar bonus system employed by the commission. Under this system, extra payments are awarded for the number of compensation claims processed. It was also introduced as a good idea to speed up delivery. What it has meant in practice is that any claims that may be difficult, such as those that need to be followed up, are set aside. It is a problem that has been mentioned here before and which elicited no official response. But then it was also dealt with by the earlier consultants. The new DG may find it worthwhile to dust off that report and read it, even though none of its recommendations were implemented. However, compensation, registration and employer compliance comprise some of the bigger, often chaotically complex, problems that face the labour department in this proclaimed decade of delivery. There are also some simpler, but no less important matters which the new DG might find worthy of more prompt attention'. By Terry Bell.