Tag: employee resignation

A recent Labour Court judgment confirms that where employers fail to properly address grievances or mitigate the cause of an employee’s complaint, a constructive dismissal claim may succeed. In Makombe vs Cape Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists and Others, the Labour Court found that a pastor employed by the Cape Conference of Seventh Day Adventists (Cape Conference) experienced constructive dismissal.

Employers regularly suspend employees from duty. This is done in a variety of circumstances for numerous reasons that may include one form of suspension is a temporary lay-off of employees due to operational circumstances.

Whether through resignation, retirement or retrenchment, people change jobs all the time. Unfortunately, most of them cash out their pension funds when they do – and it’s one of the biggest reasons why only 6 out of every 100 South Africans end up with enough money to retire, according to the South African Treasury.

Once an employee has resigned the employee cannot withdraw the resignation unless the employer consents thereto. This consent must be given prior to the expiry of the employee’s notice period when the resignation becomes effective, failing which a fresh agreement of employment will have to be concluded.

The currently considered two-pot system to restructure retirement savings to allow for limited pre-retirement withdrawal will encourage the preservation and accumulation of sufficient funds for when people retire.

On the back of COVID-19, and the widespread financial difficulties that many people experienced as a result of two years of lockdowns, some South African employees opted to resign from their jobs in order to access their retirement savings. 

The great resignation, a term coined by psychologist Anthony Klotz, is a post-pandemic movement that saw a wave of resignations take hold across the United States (US) and other parts of the world. In 2021 alone, more than a quarter of America’s total workforce resigned from their jobs.

A common occurrence in the employment relationship is for an employee to resign in the face of disciplinary action by an employer, and South African courts have previously accepted that as long as an employee resigns with immediate effect, the employer has no power to compel the former employer to go through any disciplinary process.  

The Labour Court in a recent judgment, Mthobisi Mthimkhulu v Standard Bank of South Africa (J928/20) (18 September 2020) considered whether an employee who has been found guilty of serious misconduct can avoid the ultimate sanction of dismissal by resigning before the employer imposes the sanction.

​​​​​​In a recent judgment, Gold One Limited v Madalani and Others (JR 1109/15) [2020] ZALCJHB 180 (9 September 2020), the Labour Court confirmed that intolerability is a high threshold in constructive dismissal matters. Intolerability is more than a working environment or working under employment conditions that are difficult, unpleasant or stressful.