The Labour Courts Interpretation. 2.1. In Nowalaza and Others v Office of the Chief Justice and Another (J1177/2017) [2017] ZALCJHB 234 (15 June 2017), the Labour Court dealt with the status of temporal employees. In this matter, the employees in question were judges’ secretaries employed by the Office of the Chief Justice (“OCJ”). For a number of years, the practice had been that the employees had been employed by the Department of Justice, and later by the OCJ, in terms of yearly fixed-term contracts that expired at the end of March of each year. Subsequent to this, the Auditor-General submitted a report in terms of which it advised the OCJ that the automatic renewal of fixed-term contracts of employment was in contravention of the Public Service Act, 1994 (“PSA”) and its regulations. It must be noted that the said employees were in vacant substantive posts. Vacant positions had to be advertised and a competitive process followed in filling these posts. The OCJ, therefore, decided not to appoint the judges’ secretaries on a permanent basis and adopted the stance that, in order to comply with the PSA and its regulations, the posts of the judges’ secretaries would have to be advertised and that the applicants would have to apply for the positions they occupied in terms of their fixed-term contracts. As the applicants’ remuneration exceeded the ministerially determined threshold, section 198B did not apply. The applicants therefore relied on section 186(1)(b) of the LRA. They based their case on their view that they had a reasonable expectation of indefinite or permanent employment.
