The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration reached a dispute settlement rate of 76% in the 2025/2026 financial year, Employment and Labour Deputy Minister Jomo Sibiya said at the CCMA’s 30th anniversary conference in Tshwane on 11 November, according to a SAnews report. He also told employers to approach the CCMA before they issue retrenchment notices, and he outlined proposed changes to labour law that would affect what employers pay when they dismiss for operational reasons.
Three in four disputes end in an agreement
Sibiya said the CCMA has kept its settlement rate above 70% in every one of its 30 years, and that it hit 76% last year. His reading of that number is that about three in four disputes are concluded through agreements the parties reached themselves, and that people tend to honour deals they helped to shape. The institution has dealt with more than four million referrals over three decades. It received 62 927 referrals in its first year and now receives about three times that number annually, which by our arithmetic is roughly 190 000 a year.
The CCMA has grown from 10 offices to 25 and added digital tools, including a free online labour advice tool and a WhatsApp chatbot launched in July 2026. It has also recorded its fifth consecutive clean audit, with an unqualified opinion and no findings, and met all its planned performance targets for the previous financial year.
Retrenchment talks with the CCMA are being pushed as a job saver
Sibiya said CCMA interventions in matters referred to it saved more than four in ten jobs at risk of retrenchment during the Covid pandemic, double its target, and that close to half of the jobs at risk were saved over the past year. Employers were encouraged to engage the commission before issuing retrenchment notices, to look for alternatives to job losses. Our reports on Pick n Pay’s withdrawn retrenchment process and the no retrenchment condition on the Harith FlySafair deal show how this issue is already shaping large business decisions.
Proposed labour law changes would raise severance and widen CCMA powers
The deputy minister described a proposed Labour Law Amendment Bill. According to SAnews, it would increase statutory severance pay for dismissals based on operational requirements from one to two weeks’ remuneration for every completed year of service. It also addresses the CCMA’s powers to enforce compliance orders, and it would let employees refer harassment claims to the commission. The bill also seeks protections for employees on on call, zero hours or similar contracts, including written terms on guaranteed and maximum working hours, notice for scheduling and cancelling work, and compensation where work is cancelled without proper notice. Sibiya said platform work and algorithmic decision making are changing traditional employment relationships.
Sibiya was clear that these proposals remain subject to consultation and parliamentary consideration, so none of them is law today. Employers can still prepare. A doubling of the severance rate would raise the cost of any restructuring. For the rules that apply now, our guide to the national minimum wage for employers and our report on the Employment Services Amendment Bill cover related obligations.
Waiting times remain the weak point
Sibiya said the CCMA needs to keep improving the time it takes to resolve disputes, because the length of the process has serious financial consequences for dismissed workers. Continued efforts to cut waiting times must not weaken the quality of arbitration awards, he said. He named four challenges for the next decade: labour market distress, changing forms of work, legislative reform and institutional sustainability, and called on organised labour, business and government to support the commission, with adequate resources for new responsibilities such as technology and dispute prevention.
Government has been stepping up enforcement in the same period. SAnews covered the first coordinated nationwide labour and immigration inspection blitz in July, and the Department of Employment and Labour publishes the legislation and guidance employers work from.
What this means for business
For employers, the main points are practical. A 76% settlement rate suggests that conciliation works more often than not, so it is worth treating the CCMA as a place to settle early rather than only a place to be summoned. Anyone planning retrenchments has a government signal that the commission wants to be consulted first. And any employer with operational dismissals on the horizon should track the proposed severance change, because it would apply to every completed year of service.
The settlement rate is a figure about the institution itself, and we have not seen the underlying annual report. It says nothing about how long disputes took.
What is not known
SAnews does not give a date for the Labour Law Amendment Bill to reach Parliament, and it does not say how long the average dispute now takes. Until the bill is published for comment and tabled, the severance proposal is only that, a proposal.
