Hi Guys,

Hope you can assist me? I'm going to try and keep it short......

I am currently employed by an HOA (Home Owners Association) that manages an Estate of 49 houses. We have some open erven and some building and some already finished houses.

The Estate was managed by a managing agent company and I was employed in Dec 2013 as "Admin Manager", taking over many of their duties as well as managing the Estate. When I started they had an "caretaker/maintenance" guy already employed by the HOA.

In April 2015 the HOA informed me that they will be employing an GM (general manager) to take over the projects to be attended to and I can proceed just as before - consentrating more on admin and they day to day managing of the Estate and builders. The appointment of the GM was made to be temporarily as to when the projects are all finished so will his employment...

We were informed on Friday that the HOA's looking at the option of retrenching as the income to the Estate (without increasing levies) and the expenses are not balancing and Admin is the only way to cut costs. During this whole discussion the LC(labour consultant) only discussed the process with me and the mainntenance guy and not the recently appointed GM.

I then asked if this process includes him whereafter the Chairman of the HOA said that it does as he is staff.

My questions being :

1. The appointed GM invoices us for his services during the month as he has no contract and is not on payroll but a letter was send out to all owners informing them that he has been employed as GM to assist in the running of the Estate. - Does he count as staff and would I have a case at the CCMA if the do decide to retrench me and keep him?? (Mentioning that he is an homeowner in the Estate)

2. I received information that he is being included in the process of investigating other options regarding the managment of the Estate and were included in meetings with managing agents to look at options - Is this not unfair to other employees as he is also an affected party and he somehow has an advantage joining the meetings?

That's the short of it

Hope someone can help me?

Thanks