Benchmarking Social Justice Allegiance of Dismissal Protections among the EE5 Countries

RÉNE HUYSER and PAUL SMIT I. INTRODUCTION As a consequence of globalisation, international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and, in particular, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have gone from being lobbying committees to being policy recommenders and pace-setters and, recently, even regulators of foreign trade traffic (Leary and Warner, 2010). Various nations have been affected by and responded to globalisation, in different ways. The president of the ILO said: Globalisation, like golf, requires a handicapping system that allows new players to catch up. (ILO, 2008) This statement was aimed at developing countries in general and, more specifically, fragile1 states. It has been reported that fragile countries account for a sixth of the world's population, but for half of the world's infant deaths and a third of all people surviving on less than one US dollar (USD) per day. Further, the domestic and international effects of the bleak and worsening economic situations in these fragile countries include violent conflict, instability, organised crime, migration, human trafficking, deteriorating public health and, ultimately, institutional collapse (OECD, 2007). However, a limited number of these fragile states have shown significant buoyancy amid the global economic crisis. In particular, , China, India, Indonesia and South Africa have survived (or did more than just survive) the world CCMA Commissioner Senior Lecturer, Department of Human Resource Management, University of Pretoria 1 According to the World Bank, fragile states are countries facing particularly severe development challenges, weak institutional capacity, poor governance and political instability. Often, these countries experience ongoing violence as the residue of past severe conflict (World Bank, 2012). Benchmarking Social Justice...