Leon Levy: a champion of labour rights

WITH the passing of the late Leon Levy, who at the age of 70 came back to South Africa and joined the CCMA in 1999 as a commissioner.

- MICHAEL BAGRAIM

Leon Levy and his twin brother, Norman Levy, had a fascinating history with regard to the opposition to apartheid and the building of the modern trade union movement in South Africa.I will revert to this history later on in this article, but I will firstly have a look at the early cohort of commissioners of the CCMA. Many of those early commissioners (both arbitrators and mediators) are still with us today and still serving South Africa to ensure labour peace. These commissioners are well trained both in labour legislation and mediation and many are qualified lawyers.

I have been a user of the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration as a representative since its inception in the mid-90s when the first senior commissioner in Cape Town, Sarah Christie, built up a formidable team of administrators and commissioners who ran a slick, trusted organisation to ensure that labour disputes were quickly and fairly handled.

The commissioners, supported by a hardworking and functional administration, were and are to this day the people who have ensured that the workers’ constitutional rights have been protected, and have ensured that business was able to run smoothly despite the inherent uneasy relationship between labour and capital. We have come from a very fractured past, and our modern and effective Constitution in South Africa has ensured that we are able to build a functional business community with mutual respect between employers and employees.