Minister of Labour served with demand to withdraw employment regulations

Sakeliga and NEASA have notified the Minister of Employment and Labour, Dr Nomakhosazana Meth, of our intention to seek an urgent interdict against her employment equity regulations of 15 April 2025.

The Minister is seeking to force employers to comply with her hiring quotas based on race, sex and disability from September 2025, on penalty of fines as high as 10% of turnover and eventual prosecution of executives.

The purpose of the urgent interdict would be to prevent the Minister’s unlawful actions from causing an enormous and irrevocable waste of public and private resources, which would follow should employers attempt to comply with the impossible requirements. The regulations would apply to virtually all employers in South Africa with 50 staff or more, and affects local and international employers equally.

We have given the Minister until 18 June 2025 to suspend or withdraw the regulations, failing which our attorneys are instructed to bring an urgent application. For our lawyers’ letter, click here.

The Minister’s regulations stipulate that companies should classify themselves into one of eighteen economic sectors and alter their workforce according to various racial and other hiring quotas. Most strikingly, the hiring quotas, called ‘numerical sectoral targets’ in the regulations, require companies to reduce their white male staff component to as little as 4% in many cases, and usually to under 20%. Other requirements include quotas based on sex, disability, and further racial dimensions. Ultimately, the regulations seek to achieve the government’s political goal of demographic representivity: transforming the workforce and ownership of every single business and organisation in the country into one that reflects the South African state’s demographic composition – primarily race – at every place of employment, and at every level within that organisation.

The regulations and the Employment Equity Act (as amended in 2023) establish unlawful, unconstitutional, and impossible demands. Their consequence would be severe financial harm to businesses and extensive social harm through economic disruption, increased unemployment, and legal uncertainty.

We informed the Minister that, in addition to our urgent application against her sectoral determinations and 2025 hiring quotas, we also intend to challenge the Employment Equity Act and her regulations on further grounds.