Abstract
This thesis investigates the employment status of priests in the Anglican Church of
Southern Africa (ACSA) and their treatment as workers by the ACSA. ACSA priests
are not regarded as employees in the legal sense by either the ACSA or the courts in
South Africa, which exposes them to human rights violations. After introducing the
thesis in Chapter 1 and reviewing literature in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 discusses church
governance in the ACSA. Chapter 4 then describes the principles of democracy and
the rights of workers in South Africa. These foregoing chapters set the stage for
Chapter 5 to compare ACSA Canon Law with both the South African Constitution and
South African labour law. The goal with these comparisons is to determine not only
whether ACSA priests qualify as employees, but also whether the basic human rights
of ACSA priests are currently being violated. Decolonial theory serves as an important
conceptual framework in this study, while the study’s methodology is Comparative
Policy Analysis, which forms part of the wider methodological approach known as
Policy Analysis. The central research question is: Are the regulations in the
Constitution and Canons of the ACSA, especially those that relate to priests, in
keeping with the democratic principles and employment rights currently
operative in South Africa?
Hopefully, this thesis will start a conversation in the ACSA about its own Canon Law
and how it can be better aligned with both the principles of a South African democracy
and the directives of South African labour law. The thesis will hopefully also assist the
judges and courts in South Africa to better accommodate and protect the basic human
rights of ACSA priests