2022 Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace — South Africa

In March 2022, South Africa's Department of Employment and Labour gazetted a new Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace (Government Notice R1890), issued under section 54(1)(b) of the Employment Equity Act, replacing the narrower 2005 Code on sexual harassment. The new Code widens the definition to harassment on any prohibited ground, removes the requirement to prove intent, covers single incidents and online/remote harassment, and requires employers to run a harassment risk assessment, adopt a policy, and provide training. It also aligns South Africa with the ILO's Violence and Harassment Convention (C190), which the country ratified on 29 November 2021 — the 10th country worldwide and 4th in Africa to do so.
Enforcement runs through the CCMA and Labour Court under the Employment Equity Act's unfair-discrimination framework. Independent legal commentary (Daily Maverick, 2022) documents persistent structural weaknesses: harassment law remains fragmented across several statutes, claims are hard to prove under the unfair-discrimination route, compensation is capped, CCMA commissioners apply evidentiary standards inconsistently, and there is no remedy against harassment by non-employees such as customers. Reported CCMA case-referral figures for harassment-related disputes vary between sources and could not be independently confirmed against a primary CCMA annual report in this review, so are not cited here. No independent evaluation of the 2022 Code's effect on outcomes has yet been published.

Read the full analysis: https://www.labour.gov.za/DocumentCenter/Code%20of%20Good%20Practice/Employment%20Equity/Prevention%20and%20elimination%20harassment%20in%20the%20workplace-English%20version.pdf