General Safety Regs

These apply to you if you employ anybody. There is no size threshold on the instrument as a whole. Three duties inside it do have thresholds and they are counted PER WORKPLACE, not per company: a first aid box at more than five employees, a qualified first aider at more than ten, and a first aider for every group of up to 50 employees, or up to 100 in a shop or an office. A business with four people at each of six depots has no first aid box duty at any of them and should still answer honestly about what happens when somebody is hurt, because regulation 3(1) has no threshold at all.

They apply to places you may not think of as a workplace. Section 1 of the Act defines a workplace as any premises or place where a person performs work in the course of his employment, and defines premises to include any building, vehicle, vessel, train or aircraft. A delivery vehicle is premises and its cab is a workplace. So is a yard, a container being stripped, a client's loading bay your people work in, and a workshop pit.

Several duties bind a USER OF MACHINERY as well as an employer, which is a different person. Section 1 of the Act defines a user in relation to plant or machinery as the person who uses it for his own benefit or who has the right of control over its use, excluding a lessor. So a business operating leased forklifts is the user of them and carries the regulation 2(1), 2(2), 5, 9 and 13H(1) duties for them, and the lessor does not.

If you are a mine, these do not apply to you, because section 1(3)(a) of the Act excludes a mine, a mining area and any works and the Mine Health and Safety Act 29 of 1996 governs those instead. The exclusion is about the place. A mining group's head office, its off site workshops, its stores and its road transport operation are not a mine and these regulations apply to them in full.

If your work is construction work, most of what you are looking for is NOT here. Regulations 11, 12, 13 and 13C to 13G were repealed in 2003 and the Construction Regulations, 2014 took their place. Several widely used online copies of these regulations still print all eight as though they were in force. If an adviser has quoted you regulation 13D on scaffold framework or regulation 12 on roof work, that advice is citing repealed law.

If you are looking for lighting, ventilation, thermal conditions or noise, those are the Environmental Regulations for Workplaces. If you are looking for the guarding of moving parts, lifting machines or the competent person appointed over machinery, those are the Driven Machinery Regulations and the General Machinery Regulations. If you are looking for how and when to report an incident, that is section 24 of the Act and the General Administrative Regulations. None of those is assessed here.

One oddity to know about before you read a cross reference. Regulation 1 still defines "the Act" as the Machinery and Occupational Safety Act, 1983, which was repealed in 1993. Every reference to "the Act" inside these regulations, including regulation 2C(1)'s "Subject to section 8 of the Act", is read as the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993.

Regulation 14 creates the offence, and the Act does not. Section 38(1)(a) of the Act lists the sections whose breach is an offence and no regulation is among them, so a contravention of these regulations is prosecuted under regulation 14 itself: a fine or imprisonment for a period not exceeding six months, and for a continuing offence a further R200 for each day it continues or one day's imprisonment for each day, with the additional imprisonment capped at 90 days.

Regulation 14 does not cover everything in this record. As substituted by GN 6907 of 5 December 2025 it reaches regulations 2(1), 2(2), 2(4), 2(5), 2(6), 2A, 2C, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8(1), 8(2), 8(3), 8(4), 9, 10(1) to 10(4), 11(1), 12, 13A, 13B, 13H, 13I and 13J. Regulation 2(3), the list of what safety equipment includes, is not an offence on its own, because it operates through regulation 2(2). Regulations 13C to 13G were taken out of the list in March 2025 and not put back; 13A and 13B were taken out in March and put back in December. The list still names 11(1) and 12, which were repealed in 2003.

The fine is not the exposure. Section 38(2) of the Act is: an employer who does or omits to do an act thereby causing any person to be injured at a workplace is guilty of an offence if that employer would have been guilty of culpable homicide had the act or omission caused the death of that person, whether or not the injury could have led to death, carrying a fine not exceeding R100 000 or imprisonment not exceeding two years or both. The test applied to an injury is the test for a death.

Section 37 of the Act decides who stands in the dock. Section 37(1) presumes the employer committed the offence whenever an employee did the act, unless the employer proves no connivance or permission, that the act was outside the employee's authority in any circumstance, and that all reasonable steps were taken to prevent it, and the section says expressly that issuing instructions forbidding the act is not in itself sufficient proof. Section 37(2) applies the same presumption to a contractor or subcontractor unless there is a written agreement with that mandatary on the arrangements and procedures between you. In a yard where the stacking, the welding and the confined space entries are done by contractors, section 37(2) is the whole question.

Section 1 of the Act defines "this Act" to include any regulation, so a court convicting under regulation 14 may also issue a compliance order under section 38(3) requiring compliance within a period it fixes. An inspector may prohibit the work outright under section 30(1)(b) without any prosecution at all, which is the consequence that actually stops a depot.