Have You Been Framed?

Video footage needs to meet a number of criteria before it can be used as evidence against an employee

- Ivan Israelstam

At the CCMA, it is the employer who has the full onus of proving that a dismissal was fair. For this reason, when employers are able to catch employees breaking rules on camera, they believe that they are guaranteed to win the case at the CCMA. This is not so, for many reasons.

Videotaped evidence has been accepted as valid but, just as often it has been rejected. This is because certain circumstances can render video evidence unreliable or unacceptable.

In Afrox Ltd vs Laka & Others (1999, 20 ILJ 1732), the Labour Court found that the arbitrator’s decision to disallow video footage was grossly irregular, as the evidence that the employer wanted to use was relevant to the case at hand.