In brief
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 needs one more question: which inspection was it? The Department reports its inspections Act by Act, and in each of the last three financial years only about one in three was an inspection under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. [1][2][3] The rest tested employment conditions, unemployment insurance, compensation payroll and employment equity. And the gap between the two kinds of visit is wide: in 2023/24 about 11 percent of workplaces inspected under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act were found non-compliant, against 34 percent of workplaces inspected under the OHS Act. [2] A clean record of visits is a real achievement. It is not, on the Department's own numbers, evidence that the safety file would pass.
What the Department actually counts
The Department of Employment and Labour publishes its inspection results by statute, and the statute totals add up to the headline figure. For 2022/23 it reported 312 792 inspected employers in total, made up of 4 725 Employment Equity Act inspections, 168 008 Basic Conditions of Employment Act inspections, 20 649 unemployment insurance audits, 9 946 compensation payroll audits and 109 464 OHS Act inspections. [1] Those five numbers sum exactly to the total. For 2023/24 the Department reported 308 799 workplaces inspected, of which 169 295 were Basic Conditions of Employment Act inspections and 106 390 were OHS Act inspections. [2] For 2024/25 its Annual Report records 310 798 inspections against a target of 298 104, and the Department told Parliament that 107 808 of them were OHS inspections. [3][4]
Put plainly, across three years the OHS Act share has held at roughly 35 percent of everything the inspectorate records. A visit about working hours, leave, payslips or the national minimum wage is counted separately from a visit about risk assessments, machinery, electrical installations and appointments, and the former is the larger stream by a wide margin.
The two streams do not fail at the same rate
The same releases give the non-compliance rate for each stream, and the difference is consistent.
- 2022/23: 10 percent of BCEA inspections found non-compliance; 35 percent of OHS Act inspections did. [1]
- 2023/24: 11 percent under the BCEA; 34 percent under the OHS Act. [2]
- 2024/25: the Department reported an average OHS compliance rate of 60 percent, meaning roughly 40 percent of OHS inspections found non-compliance. [3]
In other words, an OHS inspection has been about three times as likely to find a problem as an employment conditions inspection, year after year. The Department also says where the OHS problems sit: the general duties of the employer to employees, compliance with the special powers of inspectors, the reporting of incidents, and the General and Electrical Installation Regulations. [1] Those are file items. They are risk assessments, appointments, incident records and certificates of compliance, and none of them is looked at in a visit about payslips.
What an inspection is, in law, and what it is not
The OHS Act gives an inspector wide powers and no duty to certify anything. Under section 29(1) an inspector may, without previous notice, enter premises, question any person, require any book, record or document to be produced, examine and copy it, require an explanation of any entry, and inspect any article, substance, plant or machinery. [5][6] Every one of those powers is framed as something the inspector "may" do. An inspection is therefore a sample: the inspector decides what to look at, and a record that was not asked for was not tested.
Section 30 sets out what follows when an inspector finds a problem. The inspector may prohibit an act or the use of plant or machinery that threatens health or safety, may direct an employer to take specified steps within a specified period, and, where a regulation is not being complied with, may direct the steps needed to comply. [5][6] Each of these is a written instrument issued in response to something the inspector formed an opinion about on the day. Nothing in sections 29 to 31 provides for an inspector to issue a certificate that a workplace complies, and the absence of a notice is not one.
The employer's duty, meanwhile, runs continuously. Section 8(1) requires every employer to "provide and maintain, as far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of" its employees, and section 16(1) makes the chief executive officer responsible for ensuring that the employer's duties are properly discharged. [5][6] "Maintain" is the operative word. The duty on the morning after an inspection is exactly the duty on the morning before it.
Why a quiet inspection history can mislead
None of this means routine inspections are worthless. They are the Department doing its job, and an employer with nothing to report after repeated visits has earned some confidence. Three features of the published record, taken together, explain why that confidence should be checked rather than assumed.
First, the stream. Roughly two in three recorded inspections are not OHS Act inspections, so a regular visitor is more likely than not to have been testing something other than the safety file. [1][2]
Second, the rate. The stream an employer is least likely to have been tested on is the one with roughly three times the failure rate. [1][2][3]
Third, the scale of targeted operations. In the first coordinated national blitz on 24 Jul 2026, inspectors visited 114 workplaces across all nine provinces and found three fully compliant. [7][8] Blitzes check several Acts at once, including the OHS Act, and they are targeted rather than random, so that figure is not a national rate. It does show what happens when the file is opened in full by several agencies on the same morning.
What to do this week
- Find out what your last three inspections actually covered. The inspector's notice, report or contact note usually names the Act. If none names the OHS Act, you have not been inspected on it recently, whatever the visitor book says.
- Read your last OHS inspection against section 29, not against its outcome. Which records were asked for, and which were not? The ones not asked for were not tested.
- Check the items the Department itself names as the common OHS failures: a current, dated risk assessment; a section 16(2) appointment in the name of someone still in the role; incident records that match what happened; and a valid electrical certificate of compliance. [1]
- If a section 30 direction or prohibition was ever issued, keep it with the evidence that closed it out, dated, in one place. Section 30(6) also requires its contents to be brought to the attention of the health and safety representatives and employees concerned. [5]
GRC Shop view
This is our interpretation, kept separate from the sourced facts above.
We hear "we are inspected regularly" often, and it deserves a respectful answer rather than a sales one. It usually means something true and creditable: the business pays people properly, keeps its employment records in order, and has a working relationship with its local labour centre. The Department's own numbers say that is exactly what most routine inspections test, and that most employers pass it. The inspector who found nothing was right on the day, about the things they looked at.
The difficulty is the other stream. The OHS file is the part of compliance with no natural rhythm. Payroll runs every month whether anyone thinks about compliance or not; a risk assessment does not announce that it is thirteen months old, and an appointment letter stays in the file long after the person named in it has moved on. So the part of the file most likely to be wrong is also the part least likely to have been looked at, and a long run of uneventful visits can make that gap harder to see, not easier.
That is the same shape as the two objections we meet most. We already have someone for this, and we have just been audited, both describe a check that was fine on the day. The audit is fine. What fails is afterwards, because closing items out happens in email while the evidence scatters across folders, so a year later the report still reads clean and the file no longer matches it. That is not neglect. It is that nothing holds the pieces together between visits.
Compliance files go stale. Our system keeps yours current. For a business that is inspected regularly, that means one thing in practice: the day an inspector does ask for the OHS records, the answer is the same live record you would have shown on any other day, not the one you last had reason to look at.
Get a quote at https://www.grcshop.co.za/get-a-quote
Abbreviations
- BCEA: Basic Conditions of Employment Act
- OHS: occupational health and safety
References
The sources below are external links to third-party websites. We link only to publicly accessible pages and check periodically that the links still work.
[1] Department of Employment and Labour, via the South African Government, "Employment and Labour exceeds its target of inspections for 2022/23 financial year", 20 Sep 2023. https://www.gov.za/news/media-statements/employment-and-labour-exceeds-its-target-inspections-202223-financial-year-20
[2] Department of Employment and Labour, "Department of Employment and Labour Status of Compliance Report highlights the need to improve compliance with labour law", 08 Oct 2024. https://www.labour.gov.za/Media-Desk/Media-Statements/Pages/Department-of-Employment-and-Labour-Status-of-Compliance-Report-highlights-the-need-to-improve-compliance-with-labour-law.aspx
[3] SAnews, "Employment and Labour on labour law enforcement and advocacy for Inclusive Economic Growth", 29 May 2025. https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/employment-and-labour-labour-law-enforcement-and-advocacy-inclusive-economic-growth
[4] Department of Employment and Labour, "Annual Report 2024/25, Vote No. 31", 29 Sep 2025. https://www.labour.gov.za/DocumentCenter/Reports/Annual%20Reports/Departmental%20Annual%20Reports/2024/DEL%20Annual%20Report%202024-25.pdf
[5] Republic of South Africa, "Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993", sections 8, 16, 29 and 30, LawLibrary consolidated text. https://media.lawlibrary.org.za/media/legislation/369/source_file/d1068c7e542ae5f5/1993-85.pdf
[6] Southern African Legal Information Institute, "Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993", consolidated text. https://www.saflii.org/za/legis/consol_act/ohasa1993273/
[7] OFM, "Bloemfontein among hotspots as labour blitz exposes illegal employment, safety violations", 27 Jul 2026. https://www.ofm.co.za/article/centralsa/342607/bloemfontein-among-hotspots-as-labour-blitz-exposes-illegal-employment-safety-violations
[8] Eyewitness News, "'We are going to be in their offices': Govt warns employers in nationwide labour crackdown", 27 Jul 2026. https://www.ewn.co.za/2026/07/27/we-are-going-to-be-in-their-offices-govt-warns-employers-in-nationwide-labour-crackdown