Alexander Ferguson

Attorney | Labour Law

Jericho Is the Workplace

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a man is beaten, stripped, and left half-dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The priest and the Levite see him, understand his condition, and pass by.

In modern labour relations, Jericho is the workplace — the place employees travel to earn a living, where power is concentrated and vulnerability is real. Some workers are beaten not physically, but procedurally: by defective charges, withheld evidence, and decisions taken without conscience.

A recent dismissal of a maintenance technician at a major brewing site illustrates how this occurs when employers, HR practitioners and labour consultants lose sight of the spirit of the Labour Relations Act (LRA), even under the revised Code of Good Practice on Dismissal.

The Man on the Road

The employee was a maintenance technician performing ongoing, essential work — work that exists to prevent operations from ending.

He was instructed by an engineer, not his supervisor and not a person contractually authorised to instruct him, to inspect machinery and apply operational tags. He complied, despite being supplied with insufficient tags.

He completed those tasks that were practically doable and marked only those tasks as “done”, expressly recording that other machines could not be tagged due to a lack of tags.

He was nevertheless charged with failure to follow an instruction and with dishonesty for marking completed tasks as “done”. He was summarily dismissed.

Critically, no evidence was disclosed during the hearing. The inspection report relied upon was not furnished to the employee. During the hearing, the employer stated that the report would be provided to the chairperson after the hearing. It remains unclear whether this was done at all. The employee never saw the report and had no opportunity to respond.

This is the man left on the roadside.

What the Revised Code Actually Requires The revised Code of Good Practice does not relax fairness. It re-centres it.

It shifts the enquiry away from formal box-ticking toward substantive reasonableness, context, proportionality, and truth. Fairness is no longer performative; it is evaluative.

An instruction must be lawful and reasonable. Dishonesty requires intention. Trust cannot be declared broken where transparency is punished and evidence is withheld.

The Priest: HR as Custodian

The priest is condemned not for ignorance, but because he knew the law and still passed by.

HR occupies that role in the employment relationship. Under the revised Code, HR is not a neutral administrator. It is a custodian of fairness.

Here, HR facilitated the process but failed to intervene when authority was misstated, transparency was recast as misconduct, evidence was withheld, and dismissal followed without deliberation.

This is not oversight. It is abdication.

The Levite: Professional Distance

The Levite approaches, looks, and withdraws.

Labour consultants and chairpersons exist precisely to safeguard fairness where power is unequal. Independence is not a title; it is conduct.

In this matter, defective charges were accepted, intention was not interrogated, findings were immediate, dismissal was summary, and disclosure was refused. If material was placed before the chairperson after the hearing without disclosure to the employee, the imbalance is profound.

Professional distance becomes professional avoidance.

The Samaritan: The CCMA

The Samaritan is despised because he stands outside the hierarchy. So too the CCMA — often dismissed as an inconvenience, yet tasked with restoring balance when internal processes fail.

The revised Code empowers commissioners to look beyond labels and formality, and to intervene where conscience has been abandoned.

The Samaritan stops because no one else did.

A Day of Reckoning

The revised Code does not lower the bar. It raises it. When a worker lies beaten on the procedural roadside of Jericho, the question is no longer whether a hearing was held.

The question is simple: who saw, who passed by, and who stopped?

For the robbers, the priest and the Levite, the day of reckoning arrives — at arbitration or in the Labour Court — for all of Jericho to witness.

The only role that endures with honour is that of the Samaritan.