Working Paper

Do Industrial Disputes Reduce Employment? Evidence from South Africa

“This article makes two contributions. The first is to exploit an unusual dispute resolution database to provide a more nuanced and empirically based measure of industrial disputes for the labor market in South Africa. This was done by suggesting that industrial disputes can be measured by the number of cases brought to the CCMA as well as the efficiency of the CCMA’s dispute resolution processes. Efficiency was measured not only by mean turnaround times, but also through an internal inefficiency measure. The second contribution was to consider the effect of the quantity of industrial disputes as well as the efficiency of the CCMA on employment levels of South Africa.”