Archive of News

DUT employee injured during student protests

Over the past couple of days, we’ve reported on the student protests that have been taking place against tertiary institutions not allowing them to re-register for the 2014 academic year because of non-payment of tuition fees. This problem is mainly because the National Students Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) doesn’t have the money to fund these students. However, it was reported that an employee of the Durban University of Technology (DUT) was injured during these protests. But isn’t it an employer’s job to protect their employees from harm?


According to the Occupational Health and Safety Act, yes it is. You, as the employer, don’t have to go overboard in trying to protect the health and safety of your employees – e.g. you don’t have to make sure that your office environment is as clean as an operating theatre! – but you have to do whatever you can to ensure your workers’ health and safety isn’t compromised.

When it isn’t physically possible for you to protect your workers from hazards in the work environment, you must make sure that they are informed about these.

Given what the law says, surely it couldn’t have been too difficult for DUT to protect their staff members from injury during the protests? All it would’ve taken is preventing protesters from entering the DUT’s premises…

Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company.