Philip de Witt Your Electrical Certificate of Compliance Has No Expiry Date. That Is Why It Goes Stale. Ask any office, practice or school whether it has an electrical certificate of compliance and the answer is almost always yes. It is in a file somewhere, usually from when the building was bought, built or let. The Electrical Inst Oct 28, 2026
Philip de Witt Three Men Died Going Into a Tank to Help. What the Law Requires Before Anyone Goes In. On Tuesday 13 October 2026 three men died on a farm north of Herold's Bay, near George, while a fertiliser tank was being cleaned. [1][2] According to the company's statement, one worker collapsed inside the tank, two colleagues w Oct 21, 2026
Philip de Witt A Factory Inspection in Newcastle Reached the Retailers. What That Means for Every Supplier. On 05 February 2026 the Department of Employment and Labour, with the police, the Newcastle metro police and Home Affairs, inspected six clothing manufacturers in the Newcastle Industrial Park in KwaZulu-Natal. Five were not compl Oct 19, 2026
Philip de Witt A Clinic Runs on Four Two-Year Clocks. The Hazardous Biological Agents Regulations Set All of Them. Every clinic, frail care centre, dental surgery and veterinary practice in South Africa works under a set of health and safety regulations that most of them have never read in full. The Regulations for Hazardous Biological Agents, Oct 12, 2026
Philip de Witt The Science Laboratory Is a Workplace. What the OHS Act Asks of an Independent School. A school thinks of its laboratory as a classroom. The Occupational Health and Safety Act sees it first as a workplace, because the educators who teach in it and the laboratory assistant who prepares for them are employees, and eve Oct 12, 2026
Philip de Witt Only an Office? The Ergonomics Regulations Run on a Two-Year Clock. Many office-based businesses assume that the Occupational Health and Safety Act is written for factories and building sites, and that a fire extinguisher and a first aid box cover the rest. The Ergonomics Regulations, 2019 say oth Oct 5, 2026
Philip de Witt Thirty People, Three Branches: Why Your Safety Thresholds Count Premises, Not Payroll Almost every South African employer counts its safety obligations off the payroll. The Occupational Health and Safety Act does not. It counts them off the premises. A business with 30 employees at one address must designate health Oct 4, 2026
Philip de Witt We Have a Safety Consultant. Here Is What the Act Still Leaves With You. Most South African businesses that retain a health and safety consultant have made a sound decision, and most consultants do good work. But the Occupational Health and Safety Act does not move any duty onto the consultant. Section Oct 4, 2026
Philip de Witt We Are Inspected Regularly. Most Labour Inspections Never Open the Safety File. Many South African employers are visited by labour inspectors every year and reasonably conclude that, if nothing went wrong, their compliance is in order. The Department of Employment and Labour's own figures say that conclusion Sep 30, 2026
Philip de Witt A Forklift Runs on Four Clocks. None of Them Is in Your Diary. A forklift in a South African workplace carries at least four legal clocks, and a crane carries the same four. The machine itself must be thoroughly examined and performance tested by a registered lifting machinery inspector at in Sep 28, 2026
Philip de Witt Your Safety File Counts Employees. Section 9 Counts Everyone Else. Ask a South African employer how many people its safety system covers and it will give you a headcount. Ask how many people are on its premises on a normal Tuesday and the number is usually far larger, sometimes by a factor of ten Sep 25, 2026
The Blitz Tracker: Where the Department of Employment and Labour Has Inspected, and What It Found In the Department of Employment and Labour's first coordinated national inspection blitz, inspectors visited 114 workplaces across all nine provinces and found three of them fully compliant. [1][2][3] That is the single most usefu Sep 23, 2026