Hi all,
Thanks for the advice/comments. the majority of people have agreed with my side and advised that a definite case of unfair labour practice exists due to the fact that we were incorrectly/knowingly INITIALLY labeled "independent contractors" by the company in order to avoid UIF, public holiday, sick and annual leave pay etc. we were in no way independent contractors as we were initially below the earnings threshold and met ALL conditions of section 200A of the LRA or dominant impression test..they also deducted PAYE, made us fill in timesheets and take instructions, threaten sueing us when we wanted to resign to move to another outsource company due to restraint of trade and not allow us to do any other work(its in our contract). WHEN we did challenge and threaten all of the above then ONLY did they at the last minute (out of fear of losing the contract) then make us Fixed term employees with UIF, public hol pay, annual and sick leave.(after 3 years of fighting and 5 contracts signed/rolled over). now we are FTE's and have been for 3 years or so and signed/rolled over 3 contracts as FTE's. whenever we tried to take other jobs we were threatened with legal action so we stayed on. Now the client has given the contract to the competitor onsite DUE TO THESE ISSUES of bad management.

Adrian, with regards to your comments. i understand completely the scenario you are implying of contracting on project work. but in this case there was no project - the jobs were for ongoing daily IT support(such as desktop/network/hardware/helpdesk etc) a job that would never end upon completion of a task. also we were led on believing that we might get a permanent job if we proved ourselves as 3 other contractors got permanent jobs there! with regards to resigning we had no choice as we had no other job and were reliant on this income. remember we have signed in total 8 rolled over contracts over 6 years!! Other staff doing the exact same job were permanent staff of their outsourced company but not us with our employer. The contracts were always delayed as well between signing-sometimes up to 2 months of working we never got our new contracts due to bad management-when we questioned they would backdate it and send to us to sign. so does the expression of having their cake and eating it too actually apply to the broker? - in this case.

I think the below article explains my dilemma perfectly:
http://www.btimes.co.za/guide/labour/labour31.htm