UCT has an established policy framework and practice history aimed at protecting the rights and conditions of workers when services are outsourced, and—more recently—at replacing outsourcing with direct employment to ensure equivalent rights.

Historically, the University of Cape Town (UCT) adopted a Code of Conduct for outsourced workers, communicated in a Vice-Chancellor’s letter of 25 July 2005, which set binding labour standards for all companies providing outsourced cleaning, security, grounds, catering, document services, transport and similar functions on campus. The Code requires that tendering companies agree to specific provisions regarding freedom of association and collective bargaining, working conditions (including health and safety, staff development and training), and minimum wages. It explicitly states that contracted companies “will be required to pay at least 80% of the Supplemented Living Level (SLL) in 2006, 90% in 2007, and the full SLL in 2008”, with the SLL independently determined by the Bureau of Market Research, so that “the lowest paid among the contracted workers will earn a salary which should be able to cover basic needs.”

In addition, UCT extended certain institutional benefits to outsourced workers, such as fee remission (“workers’ benefit”) for workers and their dependants, thereby narrowing the gap in rights and benefits between outsourced workers and directly employed staff. These measures demonstrate a long-standing policy commitment to protecting and improving the rights and conditions of outsourced workers via contractual requirements imposed on third-party providers.

From 2015 onward, UCT moved beyond a “better outsourcing” model towards insourcing as the primary mechanism for guaranteeing equivalent rights, by bringing outsourced workers onto the university payroll. In October 2015 UCT management and worker representatives signed what the university itself described as an “historic agreement” to abolish outsourcing and “employ all currently outsourced workers who provide services on its campuses”, including cleaning, residence catering, grounds and gardening, campus protection, and staff and student transport.

A 2016 UCT “Insourcing update” explains that the process was guided by section 197 of the Labour Relations Act, and that insourced staff would be employed by UCT “on no less favourable terms and conditions of service than before.” Subsequent UCT communications confirm that insourced workers gained access to additional benefits—such as “generous leave conditions, retirement funding and staff tuition rates”—once appointed as permanent UCT staff. External reporting in 2017 further notes that UCT was, at that point, the only South African university to have brought all core outsourced workers onto the university staff, harmonising their conditions of employment with those of other employees.

Through this combination of (i) a formal Code of Conduct binding third-party contractors to minimum labour standards and (ii) a later institutional decision to end outsourcing for core services and insource workers on equivalent conditions, UCT has given concrete, policy-backed effect to the principle that workers performing university work should enjoy fair and substantially equivalent rights and protections.