14 Mar 2013

The Industrial Court faces challenges such as case backlog, manual record keeping and limited resources, Minister of Labour and Home Affairs has said.

Presenting the Industrial Court budget proposals for the 2013/14 financial year on Wednesday, Mr Edwin Batshu told Parliament that the court would continue to carry out the backlog reduction this year, in addition to other strategies it adopted such as circuit court sittings.

Mr Batshu also indicated that the backlog reduction strategy adopted by the court entailed conducting a comprehensive stocktaking exercise to determine cases ripe for hearing and enrolling them before judges for determination.

Also, he noted that the strategy also entailed taking steps to advise applicants for such cases which were not ready for enrolment to take necessary steps to complete their registration and thereafter enrolling them for determination.

He added that it further entailed weeding out cases whose parties had settled them out of court and did not therefore need to be placed before judges for hearing.

Such cases, he said were closed after necessary verification and confirmation with the affected parties.

Parliament also heard that the Industrial Court had further adopted a fast track strategy for entitlement disputes which include claims for withheld salary, accrued leave, severance benefits and overtime pay.

Minister Batshu said the strategy will commence in April with a stocktaking exercise led by the Industrial Court judge to sieve out The minister expressed hope that such strategy will be reviewed in December and that it would have helped clear a significant number of cases adding to the court’s backlog.

He reported that statistics showed that between 2004 and 2012, a total of 16 720 cases were registered out of which only 9925 were settled or disposed of, leaving 6795 cases pending settlement.

Again, he said 6780 pending cases were brought forward to 2012 from the previous years while last year the court registered 1965 new cases bringing the total number of cases to be dealt with by the court in 2012 to 8745.

He noted that the court was able to enrol for hearing last year a total of 3097 cases as a result of an increase in the number of judges and adoption of a backlog strategy.

From the total, he said the court was able to complete or settle 1950 cases while 6795 cases were pending by the end of last year.

Meanwhile, Parliament has approved the over P22 million and P2.5 million for the Industrial Court’s recurrent and development budgets respectively.

The minister said under the recurrent budget, there was a reduction of one per cent which he said was a result of centralisation of the maintenance vote at the ministry of Infrastructure, Science and Technology.

Under its development budget, the Industrial Court will use the funds to pay the final accounts for its building and facilities as well as the fleet expansion for procurement of three vehicles for the court judges.

Members of Parliament, in their debates, had expressed concern about the delay in settling of disputes and manual registration of cases as well as insufficient funding of the Industrial Court.

Some were concerned about the absence of circuit courts in their areas as well as abuse of minimum wage by some company employees.

They had also called for the need for public education on resolution of disputes between employers and employees as well as the need to review the Trade Dispute Act. ENDS