South Africa’s construction sector continues to experience fatal building failures, including the George and Ormonde collapses in 2024 and 2026. While causes differ, these incidents consistently reflect weak oversight, fragmented accountability, and limited visibility of who is on site.
“Building collapses are often framed as engineering or safety failures, but we repeatedly see a breakdown in labour compliance and site control,” says Danie Hattingh, spokesperson for business at the Building Industry Bargaining Council (BIBC). “When workers are not registered, documented, and traceable, the system fails.”
According to the International Labour Organisation, up to 38% of South Africa’s construction sector, of which the building industry is a significant part, operates outside formal systems, signalling significant non-compliance risk. For the BIBC, the implication is simple: if you don’t know who is on your site, you don’t know your risk.
This risk is amplified by layered labour structures involving subcontractors and labour brokers, where multiple ‘givers of work’ operate without real-time visibility or control over who is on site. “Where systems are not integrated into a unified compliance framework, accountability fragments and traceability weakens,” continues Hattingh, enabling non-compliant operators to undercut costs by bypassing wages, benefits, tax and protections.
This distortion reshapes the market, with non-compliant contractors undercutting compliant firms by an estimated 25% – 35%. “Cheap labour is not a competitive advantage. It is a liability that undermines compliant businesses and weakens sector resilience,” he says.
In the Western Cape, BIBC non-compliance is often an early warning sign. “To avoid levies, contractors keep workers off the books,” says Hattingh. “That triggers a domino effect: no UIF, PAYE, COIDA (Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act) or structured training and safety.” The result is lower standards with workers lacking proper induction, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and skills verification, and where health and safety files are often generic rather than site-specific.
A key driver is the shift from master builder models to layered contracting, with reliance on subcontractors and labour brokers. While responsibility is delegated on paper, legal accountability remains unchanged.
“Principal contractors may think risk is shifted through these arrangements, but the law is clear: you can delegate work, not accountability.” Under the Occupational Health and Safety Act and Construction Regulations, they retain ultimate responsibility, with joint liability under the Labour Relations Act. “When things go wrong, the law looks past contracts. The principal contractor remains accountable.”
The financial appeal of non-compliant labour is also short-lived. “A single audit can trigger back-pay, penalties and interest running into hundreds of thousands of rand,” Hattingh says. “In fatal cases, unpaid benefit obligations can reach up to R500,000 and more, per deceased worker.” When the subcontractor’s business collapses as an outcome of a building collapse, for example, liability shifts to the principal contractor, developer, or giver of work.
The inability to account for workers in emergencies is a structural outcome of non-compliance. “Off-book workers don’t appear on site registers,” says Hattingh. “In a collapse, they become invisible, delaying rescue, complicating investigations, and deepening distress for families.”
While the BIBC does not regulate health and safety, its compliance framework enables traceability. Registration ensures workers are identifiable, employment is recorded, and benefits can be activated when needed.
“What is required is an integrated system where labour records, contractor registration, and site access control are aligned, ideally digitally and in real time,” he says. “Without that, oversight is fragmented from the start.”
In response, enforcement is shifting to multi-agency High Impact Task Teams (HITTs) including the Department of Employment and Labour (DoEL), SARS, Home Affairs, SAPS and the BIBC, enabling coordinated enforcement that allows for immediate prohibition notices, including full site shutdowns for serious non-compliance. At the same time, compliance is being increasingly embedded in financial processes.
Looking ahead to 2026, enforcement is set to intensify, especially in private estates and high-value developments, shifting towards a system-based compliance model with stronger powers and penalties. A key shift is the end of the ‘passive client’ model, with developers and project owners carrying non-delegable responsibility for labour and safety compliance.
For the BIBC, compliance is not administration, it is protection. It ensures fair pay, benefits, death and injury recourse, and stronger site traceability.
For those appointing contractors, the questions are non-negotiable: is the contractor registered, are workers documented and compliant, and who is actually on site?
Because when cost-cutting replaces compliance, the consequences extend far beyond the construction site.
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