A number of people forget that in terms of section 6 of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, people that earn a certain amount per year (and that would be the salary plus any bonus they receive) are not eligible for a number of the benefits provided for in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act.  That current amount now is R205,433.  If you divided that by 13 to reflect a full bonus, which many companies give, it works out to anybody earning more than R15 802,54 a month not being entitled to certain of the benefits – the categories from which those employees are excluded include overtime, ordinary hours of work, meal intervals, daily and weekly rest periods, pay for work on Sundays, extra pay for public holidays and night work.  In other words, only people who earn less than that are entitled to those benefits.  Those earning more than that still have certain rights, for example, they can legally refuse to work more than 12 hours in any one day, although again, there are certain circumstances where they cannot such as in what is known as emergency overtime. 

I think that is very important to note this because the basic thinking is that people who are earning a good enough salary are able, to a larger extent, to look after themselves a lot more capably and don’t necessarily need all of the protection of the whole of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act.   The Act on a whole though still discourages many foreign businesses from setting up operations in South Africa as it is not competitive with standards in the rest of the world.