Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
Con Court on collective bargaining
This Court has previously recognised that the right to “collective bargaining between the employer and . . . [employees] is key to a fair industrial relations environment”. The LRA is concerned with the power imbalance between the employer and employees. It sanctions the use of power by employers and employees, but only as a last resort, and only after the issue in dispute between the parties has been referred for conciliation. Collective bargaining therefore implies that each employer-party and employee-party has the right to exercise economic power against the other once the issue in dispute has been referred for conciliation, and only if that process fails in one of the manners described above.
