Godsell gets flak over stance on garnishee orders

BOBBY Godsell, chairman of Business Leadership South Africa, is out of sync with reality when it comes to issues relating to garnishee orders, according to academic Frans Haupt, who heads the University of Pretoria’s Law Clinic.

Godsell, former AngloGold Ashanti CEO who recently publicly lambasted companies for docking employees wages by attaching garnishee orders to their pay, said he would have refused to do this if he was a mine manager.

Speaking at a round-table discussion this week, Haupt responded that if he were a mine manager he wouldn’t listen to Godsell.

Haupt said he was filled with “great sadness” at Godsell’s comments, which he attributed to a lack of knowledge about the matter. Garnishee orders were “a legal instrument”, he said.

“If you do not want to do that, how must they go and collect? With baseball bats?” he said.

However, it remains a contentious issue with many people supporting Godsell’s stance primarily because lenders have abused the garnishee system.

One of the issues that sparked the Marikana bloodshed, for example, was the fact that many mines were docking miners’ pay thanks to garnishee orders, which meant that in some cases, workers had almost their entire salaries docked.

Godsell, who has called for a national debate on garnishee orders, said: “In a sensible world with responsible citizens, it would not happen that a miner takes home just 20% of his gross wage without his supervisor’s knowledge.”

Haupt warned, however, that people who listened to Godsell might find themselves in trouble legally as the National Credit Act provided that if an employer failed to pay over as legally obliged then creditors could attach property belonging to that employer. Worse, an employer refusing could be found to be in contempt of court.

Haupt said that if those orders were not respected it would undermine values that Godsell claimed to stand for.

Addressing the injustices of the garnishee system was a subject being probed by a Chamber of Mines task team, which is grappling with how to resolve the heavy indebtedness of mineworkers.