Can it really be “Silly Season” time again? Seems like just yesterday we were all celebrating the birth of a brand-new 2018…

The reality of course is that Year End is now just around the corner, and for many employees that means rapidly-growing expectations of an annual bonus.

Unfortunately not every business will be able or willing to double their monthly salary bill to meet these expectations, and every year at this time the CCMA is landed with the resulting bitter disputes. We discuss whether our law automatically obliges employers to pay bonuses, and lay out the three essentials for both employers and employees to follow in order to avoid any unhappiness or argument.

Whether you are owed money by a maintenance defaulter or by a general debtor, our law gives you a range of collection options. 

One of them is the sequestration application – in itself a powerful incentive to the debtor to pay up because of the loss of control over his/her own affairs it entails.

But what do you have to prove in order to succeed in such an application? And how do you prove that the debtor is actually insolvent? We look at an illustrative High Court case in which a mother with a R228,000 claim for arrear maintenance won her case against a series of desperate defences raised by her ex-husband.

You are arrested in a foreign country and told that you have contravened the local laws. You face prison, or worse.

“But I acted totally innocently” you protest “that’s legal in South Africa; I had no idea it was different here”. “Tough”, replies the stony-faced local law enforcement officer, “you should have found out what our local laws and customs are before you came here”.

An official government warning to do just that follows reports of a death sentence imposed by Vietnam on a South African drug smuggler. We discuss how the warning applies to you and not just to drug smugglers, the dangers of ignorance, and of how to protect yourself from arrest and prosecution.

No doubt we are in for at least a year or two of difficult economic conditions, but small businesses have one important advantage over larger competitors – their size keeps them agile. That means they can adapt more quickly to changing conditions, which in turn puts them in pole position to grasp the many opportunities that always accompany change and challenge. 

Here are some thoughts on how to get started with that - “6 ways SA small businesses can survive the dire economy - which may last until 2020” is on BusinessInsider.