As the reporting season looms near from the 1st of September 2019, employers will have to utilise the Revised Income Differentials EEA4 form for their reporting on remuneration.

The main purpose of the EEA4 Form is to collect information for the establishment of norms and benchmarks to reduce the remuneration gap between the highest paid and lowest paid employees, attendees were told.

Niresh Singh from the Department of Employment and Labour Policy Development said, the old way of collecting data from employers was not effective hence the revised form.

We have been collecting this information from the inception of reporting but it was not achieving its desired results. It’s illegal to pay someone based on race and gender, and a workplace policy should be in place and utilised for the disclosing of the income differential gap between employees in workplaces, said Singh.

Singh encouraged the workshop attendees to refrain from reporting manually but rather, utilise the online system. We are likely to do away with manual submissions in the near future. If employers encounter challenges with the system, they can submit their hard copy applications for capturing immediately at the Labour Centre, said Singh.

Employers are reminded to submit both the EEA2 and EEA4 forms together when reporting.

Zooming into the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work in the pipeline, Employment and Labour official, Innocent Makwarela said, the convention leaves no employee or worker behind.

This convention applies to all sectors, whether private or public, both in the formal and informal economy, and whether in urban and rural areas, said Makwarela.

He told attendees that to ratify the Convention; the Commission for Employment Equity would need to review the current EE policy instruments on harassment and sexual harassment in relation to the Employment Equity Act and its regulations, including the Codes of good practice on handling Sexual Harassment in the workplace and the Code of Good Practice on the Integration of EE into HR policies and practices.

Presenting on Sexual Harassment Cases, Brunhilde Frohnapfel from Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) said that the majority of sexual harassment cases between 2015 and 2018 revealed that 78.6% of cases reported were from females and only 23.3% were male. She said that these numbers are not a true reflection of what is happening in the workplaces as many people especially males are reluctant to report their cases.

We know that many people don’t report their cases due to fear of intimidation. We need employers to advocate and be vocal about their sexual harassment policies and how effective they can be. This will help in more people coming forward, said Frohnapfel.

The workshops are aimed at employers or heads of organisations, academics, assigned senior managers, consultative forum members, human resource practitioners, trade unions representatives and employees.

The next roadshow will be held tomorrow (August 22), at Fortis Hotel in Witbank, followed by Limpopo Province (27 August), Bolivia Lodge, Plot162, Tweefontein

Polokwane.

All national workshops are held from 08:30 to 14:00 and members of the media are invited. The EE roadshows will end on 26 September 2019 in Johannesburg.

Source: Department of Labour