CODE OF GOOD PRACTICE ON THE PREVENTION AND ELIMINATION OF HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE

On the 18th March 2022, the Minister of Employment and Labour published the Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace (The Code). This repeals the Amended Code of Good Practice on the Handling of Sexual Harassment Cases in the Workplace, 2005.
The Code seeks to cover a wider scope of harassment in the workplace, including sexual harassment. The Code sets out the different types of harassment as follows:

• Physical harassment includes physical attacks, simulated, or threatened violence, or gestures (such as raising a fist as if to strike a person or throwing objects near a person).
• Verbal bullying may include threats, shaming, hostile teasing, insults, constant negative judgment, and criticism, or racist, sexist or LGBTQIA+ phobic language.
• Psychological harassment in the workplace may be associated with emotional abuse and involves behaviour that has serious negative psychological consequences for the complainant/s such as is often the case with verbal abuse, bullying and mobbing.
• Slandering or maligning an employee or spreading malicious rumours.
• Conduct which humiliates, insults or demeans an employee.
• Withholding work-related information or supplying incorrect information.
• Sabotaging or impeding the performance of work.
• Ostracising, boycotting, or excluding the employee from work or work related activities.
• Persecution such as threats, and the inspiration of fear and degradation.
• Intolerance of psychological, medical, disability or personal circumstances.
• Surveillance of an employee without their knowledge and with harmful intent.
•  Use of disciplinary or administrative sanctions without objective cause, explanation, or efforts to problem solving.
• Demotion without justification.
• Abuse, or selective use of, disciplinary proceedings.
• Pressuring an employee to engage in illegal activities or not to exercise their legal rights.
• Pressuring an employee to resign.

The Code encourages employers to adopt a zero-tolerance attitude toward harassment in the workplace. Employers must create and maintain a working environment in which the dignity of employees are respected and should adopt a
harassment policy, ensuring it is effectively communicated to all employees.
Employers should develop clear procedures to deal with harassment which enable the resolution of problems in a gender-sensitive, confidential, efficient, and effective manner. When an employee has reported an alleged incident of harassment or laid a complaint, the employer is obliged to investigate the allegation and advise the complainant of the procedures available to deal with the harassment. In terms of the Code, when an allegation of harassment has been brought to the attention of the employer, the employer must

• consult all relevant parties;
• take the necessary steps to address the complaint in accordance with the Code and the employer’s policy; and
• take all necessary steps to eliminate the harassment.

Employers who fail to take all necessary steps to eliminate harassment within a reasonable time may render themselves vicariously liable, even if the harassment consists of a single incident.

Mat Fforde
Cell: +27 (0)83 357 8390