By Adriaan Andrews
The current rate (as of March 2025) is R28.79 per hour and affects roughly 5.5 million workers. Projections suggest the rate will rise by about 5% from the 2025 to approximately R30.23 per hour in 2026, assuming CPI averages around 3.5%.
Wage-setting cannot be separated from how voices are gathered, and who is seen and heard in the public participation process.
According to the Commission’s summary of public input for the 2026 adjustment (Government Gazette, 11 December 2025), the process yielded 35 written inputs received by the Department of Employment and Labour: 3 from trade unions, 7 from interested parties, 25 from employees’ representatives, and a total of 437 respondents who took part in the survey. This is a miniscule percentage of the 5.5 million affected workers.
While the Commission made efforts to advertise the call for submissions, including online platforms and 75 community radio stations, the outcome itself points to a deeper challenge. A country of millions of low-wage workers cannot meaningfully be represented by a few hundred voices.
Public participation that relies primarily on written submissions and digital platforms, excludes workers who face literacy barriers, limited internet access, long working hours, geographic isolation, or fear of employer retaliation. When participation mechanisms are not inclusive of these realities, the result is an evidence base that is technically sound but socially incomplete.
The workers most affected by the national minimum wage are not hard to find. They are already there: in homes, on farms, in small shops, on construction sites, and in informal markets. The task is to ensure that policy processes are willing to go to them, organise structured consultations including rural and underrepresented provinces. Find out what people think and face in their lived realities.
The Commission’s report acknowledges that up to 40% of workers earn below the national minimum wage, with particularly high non-compliance in agriculture, domestic work, elementary occupations, and informal employment. These are precisely the workers least likely to submit written representations, complete online surveys, or even hear about government notices.
Adding to this, in certain sectors the minimum wage increases unemployment because of its blanket approach, which not all sectors can afford. Perhaps some of the millions of excluded workers would have said there should not be a blanket national minimum wage. We don’t know because they were not consulted.
The voice of business was also entirely under-represented, with inputs primarily from large, organised businesses through Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), but little to no input from SMMEs (small, micro and medium-sized enterprises) or informal employers.
If the goal is real and robust public participation, then the responsibility cannot rest with the Commission alone. South Africa already has institutions that are embedded in communities and carry an explicit public engagement mandate. Public hearings should be held in all nine provinces, ensuring that workers and business owners can speak directly to commissioners; community realities can be captured first-hand.
Meaningful participation across the board necessitates meeting people where they are. In-person provincial hearings, sector-specific roundtables, community listening sessions, and partnerships with educational institutions, NGOs, faith-based organisations, and worker centres can capture insights that surveys alone cannot.
Local government, for example, is constitutionally positioned at the coalface of community life. Municipalities engage regularly with residents through ward committees, and townhall community hall discussions They are precisely and uniquely placed to facilitate structured engagements with groups whose voices are consistently underrepresented in national policy processes.
Political parties, particularly those with constituency offices in townships, rural areas, and informal settlements, also have a role to play. Regardless of ideological position, these offices exist to engage communities on issues that directly affect their livelihoods. Wage policy is one such issue, and constituency-based dialogues could provide valuable qualitative insight into the lived experiences of low-wage work.
To broaden access, feedback channels should include toll-free phone lines for voice submissions, WhatsApp-based simple submission tools, short, worker-friendly online forms, local pop-up engagement points at libraries, community halls and labour centres, and translation of notices into local languages.
Such approaches build legitimacy, improve trust in institutions, and ultimately strengthen compliance, a persistent challenge identified in the Commission’s own report. It loudly calls for nationwide public hearings and much broader engagement. This should be taken seriously, not as criticism, but as an opportunity
Adriaan Andrews has a master’s degree in Labour Relations and Human Resources from Nelson Mandela University. He is a lecturer in the School of Industrial and Organisational Psychology and HR.