Accentuating the Need to Protect the Rights of Retail Sector Workers in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is a modern and evolving technological environment whereby advancements such as artificial intelligence (AI) affect people's livelihoods and jobs. The 4IR is anticipated to have an impact on numerous employment relationships in the South African retail industry by substituting workers with new technologies and systems, forcing retail companies to retrench retail sector workers. In light of this concern, methodologically, this article used a literature review research approach to critically examine the protection offered by the Labour Relations Act (LRA), Unemployment Insurance Act (UIA), Unemployment Insurance Contributions Act (UICA), and Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA), to determine what protective mechanisms these legislation offer to safeguard the rights of South African retail sector workers who will lose their jobs due to the introduction of new technologies in the workplace. The findings were that the LRA and the BCEA offer severance pay as the sole financial protection designed exclusively to mitigate the effect that lawful retrenchments have on affected employees, whereas the UIA provides a UIF benefit only to retrenched workers who were registered by their employers to the UIF and who had contributed appropriately to the UIF, to the exclusion of employees whose employers did not register them to the UIF. This means that the UIF and severance package provide compensatory benefits to only a certain portion of employees. Consequently, these benefits are insufficient to safeguard the rights of retrenched South African retail sector workers who may become permanently unemployed in the era of 4IR. As a result, it was proposed to implement measures such as reskilling the workforce before retrenchment considerations to increase their chances of obtaining employment in the 4IR era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]