Manager – Labour Law 4.0 niche |

Ratula Beukman has an LLB from the University of Western Cape Town and is completing a Master’s in Law at the University of Cape Town. She has been teaching labour law at the University of the Western Cape since 2015 and is currently a researcher in various aspects of labour law. She was admitted as an attorney in 2012.

She has been involved in different areas of advocacy in her career, and as an advocacy programme manager at the Black Sash contributed to, among other things, the equalization of the Older Person’s eligibility criteria to the Social Assistance Grant by lowering of the age of men from 65 to 60 years to qualify for the OPG.

Ratula also campaigned for the extension of Child Support Grant to the age of 18 years, which lead to incremental increase in the qualifying age of children from 14 to 18 years to access the CSG. In addition, she contributed to the following:

• The establishment of the Independent Tribunal for Social Assistance Appeals at the Department of Social Development.
• Bread Price Collusion Tiger Brand & Pioneer Foods – secured the fining of Tiger Brands by the Competition Commission of R96 million for bread price fixing.
• Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) Bill – improved the calculation and period of Benefit payments to workers and aligning maternity benefit to the ILO standards.

Ratula has also worked as a researcher, contributing to various evaluations of national, regional and international programmes. Her role extended to fieldwork, gathering evidence, synthesizing and producing field work write-ups which are central to the evaluation report.

At the Black Sash, she also worked in various ways to help build the capacity of the local community organisations. Together with four regional offices, she managed education & training support, resourcing and guidance and ensuring strong national communication with advice offices in South Africa. She was responsible, together with the regional teams, for developing and disseminating materials and implementing awareness-raising activities, educational courses and workshops, and mentorship programmes to ensure that information and analysis is shared within the organization and publicly.

The work involved policy analysis, policy and legislative research in specific substantive practice areas with an emphasis on constitutional law, administrative law, social security law, consumer law and labour law, as well as various government precepts, regulations and laws.

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