From confusion to compliance – how TES helps businesses navigate the 2026 labour law shake-up

South Africa is on the cusp of the most significant labour law reset in over a decade.

In February 2026, the Minister of Employment and Labour published the Labour Laws Amendment Bill, 2025 and the Labour Relations Amendment Bill, 2025 for public comment.

This signals a broad recalibration of how employment relationships are structured, regulated, and enforced. While these Bills have not yet been enacted, their eventual proclamation by the President will signal a structural shift in how we manage the South African workforce.

For businesses, this is not a time for minor tweaks to HR manuals and policy updates. It is a time for a fundamental redesign of the employment relationship.

As the landscape shifts, the role of a Temporary Employment Services (TES) provider is evolving beyond being a source of additional headcount to becoming critical partners in operational compliance architecture.

The five major pillars of the 2026 shift

The proposed legislation introduces five material shifts that every employer must understand:

1. Regulating “on-call” and flexible work: Introduction of Section 9B of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act regulates minimum protections for employees engaged on “as-and-when-needed”, zero-hours, or on-call arrangements. This includes defined working hours and reasonable notice periods for both scheduled work and cancellations. Importantly, where work is cancelled without sufficient notice, employees may be entitled to payment for those lost hours.  For businesses reliant on flexible staffing models, this represents a shift from informal agility to structured predictability, with direct cost implications.
2. Doubling severance: The Bill proposes increasing the statutory severance threshold (currently one week per year), with drafts suggesting a potential move towards two weeks per completed year of service. This is an important highlight for businesses contemplating restructuring. It has significant implications for long-term workforce planning, particularly in cyclical or project-based industries.
3. Minimum wage take-home pay parity: Minimum wage compliance will increasingly focus on cash remuneration payable for ordinary hours, excluding certain deferred or contingent benefits such as bonuses or similar benefits. This change reinforces a focus on cash remuneration payable for ordinary hours worked, rather than total cost-to-company structures. Employers who rely heavily on variable or deferred pay components will need to review whether their models remain compliant under the revised framework.
4. The three-month threshold:  The proposals introduce greater flexibility in dismissals during the first three months of employment, particularly in relation to procedural requirements, while retaining the core requirement of fairness. For employers, this means probation and onboarding processes must be carefully structured to align with both flexibility and fairness, rather than relying on outdated assumptions about reduced legal obligations.
5. High-earner limits: Remedies for those earning above a specific threshold (proposed at R1.8m per annum) may face limits on reinstatement and capped compensation in unfair dismissal cases, except in instances of automatically unfair dismissals. This marks a notable policy shift aimed at balancing fairness with proportionality in dispute resolution outcomes.

The risk of the legacy mindset

The greatest risk facing businesses is not the legislation itself, it is the persistence of legacy thinking. Many organisations are operating and relying on outdated legacy contracts, including cost-to-company (CTC) weighted pay models, exclusivity clauses that could become non-compliant overnight and rigid workforce models.

As the legal framework evolves, these legacy systems create exposure across multiple fronts

Including misalignment with minimum wage requirements resulting in miscalculated take-home pay, procedural vulnerabilities and invalid probation dismissals, escalating severance disputes as liabilities double and non-compliant flexible work arrangements.

These risks are not theoretical.

They translate directly into CCMA disputes, operational disruption, and financial liability. Furthermore, the amendments coincide with a new Code of Good Practice on Dismissals, which requires nuanced, contextual fairness that is difficult to achieve without expert guidance.

TES as compliance architecture

In such an environment, a sophisticated TES provider does more than supply labour.

No longer limited to supplying contingent labour, a sophisticated TES partner operates at the intersection of contract design, workforce planning, remuneration structuring, and risk management. In doing so, they embed compliance into the operational fabric of the business before disputes arise.

This includes:

• Designing compliant flexible workforce models: Aligned to emerging Section 9B requirements.
• Auditing remuneration structures: Ensuring parity and minimum wage compliance on a take-home basis rather than just total cost-to-company.
• Standardised onboarding and probation frameworks: Aligning frameworks to reflect evolving dismissal practices.
• Risk transfer: Providing pre-tested contract templates and centralised legal interpretation that reduces direct employer exposure to CCMA and Labour Court risk.
• Centralising regulatory expertise: Enabling faster, more consistent compliance decisions

From reactive compliance to strategic advantage

At Workforce Staffing, we are already future proofing our models. We are already aligning our models with the direction of the draft legislation, reviewing contract structures, stress-testing severance exposure, and refining flexible workforce frameworks in anticipation of the final amendments.

The objective is simple, to ensure that when the legislation is enacted, our clients are not reacting under pressure but operating with confidence.

The 2026 labour law reset should not be viewed purely as a compliance burden. It is an opportunity to build a more resilient, transparent, legally protected, future-fit and productive organisation where legal certainty supports, rather than constrains, growth.

By moving compliance from a reactive risk to a proactive strategic advantage, South African businesses can focus on growth while their TES provider handles the complexities of the evolving legislative framework.

Early preparation will always beat reactive litigation. The front line of risk is no longer the disciplinary hearing or the CCMA. It is the contract, the roster, and the pay structure. Businesses that recognise this shift early will not only avoid disruption, but they will also gain a competitive edge. Ensure your partner is ready to hold that line.

Natashia Moosa, Commercial Manager for Africa and Middle East at Workforce Staffing.

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