Abstract
Harmonising the conditions of employment in South African higher education sector is accentuated by the insourcing of their support service employees. Insourcing focuses on redressing historically imbalanced employment practices aligned to national transformation initiatives, while creating a diverse workforce. Heterogeneous employment conditions arise with transformation that reflect inclusive, objective and justified conditions of employment through various interventions. Harmonisation of service conditions after insourcing is one such intervention used to reduce or eliminate imbalances within and between occupational categories. Yet, conditions of employment of insourced employees may be imbalanced compared to other employees even after harmonisation.
This study explored the harmonisation of conditions of employment in the South African education sector. These were the study objectives: explore the harmonisation legislative processes; identify challenges and opportunities in the harmonisation processes; and propose a harmonisation framework for the South African educational sector. A sequential multi-method qualitative design underpinned by the interpretivistic paradigm employed the document analysis, interviews and focus group discussions as data gathering instruments for the study. The purposive stratified snowball sampling strategy was used to select these research participants: institutions and documents; nine managers for semi-structured interviews; and seven insourced employee representatives for focus group discussions. Data was analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis.
Key findings are as follows: labour legislation and ILO principles were adhered to during harmonisation; challenges in the harmonisation process arose from internal and external institutional factors; and benefits accrue to insourced employees only in terms of improved employee morale and the promotion of the decent work agenda. Theoretically, the study contributes to the body of knowledge on insourcing, outsourcing and harmonising workplace conditions of employment.
Methodologically, the study contributes in the use of the qualitative multi-method design, employing multiple instruments to explore a social science research phenomenon. The practical contribution is the proposed Management Framework for
iii
Harmonising Conditions of Employment after Insourcing that effectively guides management towards harmonious, fair and equitable workforce engagement after the insourcing of outsourced employees into the workforce.