EMPLOYMENT SERVICES AMENDMENT BILL: PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

EMPLOYMENT SERVICES AMENDMENT BILL: PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

• 21 September 2026
• Parliament
• SA Legal Academy

The National Assembly’s Employment & Labour Committee has issued a backdated media statement calling for written submissions on the Employment Services Amendment Bill. The deadline for input is 6 November 2026. Parliament’s website having been offline on 18 September 2026, the statement appears to have been published during the weekend – effectively reducing the commentary period by three days.

Tabled in May 2026, the proposed new piece of legislation is underpinned by government’s commitment to:

• promoting ‘national security and national interests’, and
• preventing ‘worker exploitation … (including employer access to) cheap labour through undocumented foreign nationals’.

This is according to a media statement on the May 2025 Cabinet meeting at which the Bill was approved for tabling. As SA Legal Academy has already reported, with those overarching objectives in mind, once passed, enacted and operationalised the Bill will enable the Minister to set quotas for the sectoral, occupational, and location-specific employment of foreign nationals.

Among other things, a pre-tabling explanatory summary gazetted shortly before the Bill’s formal introduction in Parliament referred to provisions:

• extending the scope of the Act to cover:
  • foreign nationals
  • ‘private employment agencies not operating for gain’, and
  • ‘workers’ in general
• regulating the employment of foreign nationals in a manner consistent with the purpose of:
  • the 2014 principal statute
  • the 2002 Immigration Act, and
  • the 1998 Refugees Act
• empowering the Minister ‘to make regulations in respect of matters related to labour migration’
• expanding the functions of the Employment Services Board
• providing for ‘the establishment and governance of supported employment enterprises’
• providing for ‘further offences and the improved enforcement of the Act and immigration laws regulating work by foreign nationals’, and
• providing for exemptions from the principal statute, as amended.

Please click the links below for more information:

• Bill
• committee media statement
• explanatory summary
• May 2025 Cabinet media statement

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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