Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

Cabinet has approved the Labour Laws Amendment Bill for public comment, but what about the built-in paradox: the Bill makes it easier to hire and dismiss during a probation period without facing unfair dismissal claims, but more expensive to let go. 

Statutory severance pay doubles from one week to two weeks' remuneration per completed year of service, so the cost of getting it wrong goes up, even as the barrier to entry comes down.

Then there's the contractor question 

The Bill extends employment protections to platform workers (delivery drivers, e-hailing operators, freelancers). But if your contract calls someone an "independent contractor" yet your business controls how, when and where they work, the law may soon call them an employee (with sick leave, severance, collective bargaining and unfair dismissal protection).

The on-call worker provision question

Industries relying on shift workers or zero-hours arrangements (hospitality, retail, security, healthcare) could face operationally disruptive changes as the Bill requires scheduling terms to be put in writing, including maximum working hours, availability windows and reasonable notice periods for both call-ins and cancellations. 

In other words, cancel a shift without enough notice, and the company has to pay for it anyway. A fundamental change for employers running 200+ shift workers across multiple sites.

Why doesn’t the Bill mention AI?

This Bill rewrites the rules of work in South Africa, but doesn't mention artificial intelligence once. It regulates the gig worker delivering your food, but says nothing about the AI agent that dispatched them.

Meanwhile, South Africa's Draft National AI Policy is to be gazetted for public comment this very month, and nearly 70% of SA HR teams are already using AI in recruitment and workforce planning.

Two landmark policy processes, running in parallel, covering the same workforce, and apparently not talking to each other. The Labour Bill regulates human workers. The AI policy governs technology. Neither addresses the point where the two meet, which is, increasingly, everywhere.

Is the law being written for today or a workplace that existed five years ago? That’s something to watch.

Nomfundo Vilakazi joined Dis-Chem Pharmacies as the new head of people and culture while seven months pregnant. Far from a well-oiled machine, she at least inherited a blank slate, with thousands of employees across hundreds of stores, needing a new people strategy rebuilt from scratch.

The question worth sitting with: In a world where AI can automate half the admin and a labour law overhaul is weeks away, who can afford not to rebuild their people function?

R235 billion

is what presenteeism costs the South African economy every year – nearly 4% of GDP. In a time when the new minimum wage increase (from R28.79 to R30.23 per hour) affects employer costs by percentage points, isn’t it worth considering that presenteeism is fundamentally about disengagement? 

People check out when doing low-value, repetitive work that doesn't challenge them. So wouldn’t AI automation, in theory, be an important part of the cure? More importantly, is your AI adoption strategy aimed at making your people more engaged — or just more productive? Those are not the same thing.

Source: Sanlam Benchmark Survey, 2025

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