Building a Fairer Labour Market for South Africa
The Fair Pay Bill is an Amendment Bill introduced by Build One South Africa to strengthen and modernise the Employment Equity Act (EEA), with the aim of addressing one of the most persistent and overlooked drivers of inequality in South Africa's labour market: how people are paid.
For too long, wage-setting practices have quietly reinforced historical disadvantage. Workers entering new roles are often asked what they earned before, and that figure, shaped by unequal opportunity, limited access, or discriminatory conditions, becomes the basis for what they are offered next. In this way, inequality is not only inherited; it is repeated.
The Fair Pay Bill seeks to break this pattern by introducing targeted, structural reforms. It prohibits the use of past salary information in hiring decisions, ensuring that individuals are assessed based on their skills, experience, and the value of the role itself. It requires employers to disclose salary ranges in job advertisements, bringing transparency to a process that has long operated behind closed doors. It also protects the right of employees to request and share pay information, empowering workers to engage more fairly in the labour market.
Taken together, these measures are designed to create a system in which pay is determined openly, objectively, and fairly. The Bill does not seek to disrupt the labour market — it seeks to strengthen it by ensuring that opportunity is not constrained by history, and that remuneration reflects merit rather than past disadvantage.
At its core, the Fair Pay Bill is about building a labour market that is more transparent, more competitive, and more just.
The Fair Pay Bill was formally introduced by Build One South Africa and Pay Me Fairly following an extensive stakeholder engagement and drafting process. The document below is the final version of the Bill as submitted.
Stakeholders, employers, workers, HR professionals, and civil society were engaged throughout the process, and their input directly shaped the final legislation.
Inequality is not only visible in who has access to work, but in how that work is valued and rewarded. When salaries are determined without transparency, and when past pay is used as a benchmark for future earnings, the system quietly reproduces the very disparities it should be working to eliminate.
This has real consequences. It limits mobility for talented individuals, discourages workers from pursuing better opportunities, and entrenches wage gaps across race, gender, and age. It also creates a labour market where information is unevenly distributed, where employers hold the advantage, and workers are left to negotiate without clarity or certainty.
The Fair Pay Bill responds to this imbalance by introducing fairness into the foundation of how pay is set. By removing the link between past and future earnings, and by making salary information more transparent, it creates the conditions for a more open and equitable system.
This matters not only for individual workers, but for the economy as a whole. A labour market that rewards merit, enables mobility, and builds trust is one that is better positioned to grow, innovate, and include.