The decision in National Education Health & Allied
Workers Union on behalf of Sinxo & others and Agricultural
Research Council is important primarily for two reasons.
Firstly, it deals with when an employee can claim that he or she
has been discriminated against on an arbitrary ground as envisaged
in section 6(1) of the Employment Equity Act, 1998 (the
"EEA"). Secondly, it serves as an alert
to employers that when formulating a defence to an equal pay claim,
the defences set out in regulation 7 of the 2014 Employment Equity
Regulations (the "EE Regulations") must
be considered carefully.
In this case, the applicants had been employed by the
Agricultural Research Council ("ARC") as
farm foremen for a lengthy period of time. As a result of
organisational restructuring, they were graded as farm supervisors
at global grade (GG) 5. Other employees, who the applicants claimed
performed the same work as them, were graded as farm foremen at the
higher grade of GG8. The
