Mandla Dlamini is one of more than 10-million recipients of the social relief of distress grant that the government introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic. The R350 he receives each month is the only direct income the father of four gets. Until 2018, Dlamini had a full-time job at VR Laser, a steel company that specialised in cutting and bending armour plate in Ekurhuleni’s industrial area of Dunswart.

Dlamini and his 280 fellow workers were retrenched after the company’s directors opted to put the company into business rescue in February 2018. It was the unions organising employees at VR Laser — the National Union of Metalworkers of SA and Solidarity — that mooted the idea of retrenchments. Employees had not been paid for two months since the introduction of the business rescue plan and nonpayment was gnawing away at their livelihoods. The unions felt that if they were retrenched, workers could at least receive their provident monies and claim unemployment benefits from the Unemployment Insurance Fund...