The powers of the National Labour Commission (NLC) should be strengthened to allow it enforce its decisions without having to go to the courts, says Senyo M. Adjabeng, Arbitrator and Managing Consultant, Corporate Aims Services Limited, a labour consultancy. “If the Labour Commission is strengthened a bit so that their decisions are strong enough to stop them from going to the courts to enforce them when people do not follow the rulings, it will augur well for both employees and employers.” Section 172 of the Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651) states that “Where a person fails or refuses to comply with a direction or an order issued by the Commission under this Act, the Commission shall make an application to the High Court for an order to compel that person to comply with the direction or order.” Mr. Adjabeng said Parliament and the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare, the institutions overseeing the activities of the Commission, should help the Commission become stronger in arbitrating workplace issues. He was speaking to human resources executives at a monthly forum organised by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) Ghana to help advance the HR profession. He said though the Commission and the Labour Court are two strong and robust institutions, a lot more could be done to make them more effective. “The Commission must be resourced with equipment, human resources and infrastructure to be able to open regional centres, and the number of courts needs to be increased to two so that labour cases can be dealt with faster. “The only problem with the system is not about the quality of justice but the time that it takes to get that justice. Justice delayed is justice denied, and that is the difficulty we are facing right now in obtaining justice,” he added. Speaking under the topic “Do Employers Have the Right to Terminate at Will?”, he said under the new Labour Act, (Act 651) Section 8, passed in 2003, employers have the right to terminate employment of employees. “However, the law further provides for the fair termination of employment and requires that employers who terminate the employment of their workers prove upon the inquest from a judicial authority that their action was fair and reasonable under the circumstances of the case.” He said organisations that argue the right of ‘termination at will’ and who think that termination of an employee can be undertaken at anytime by only giving appropriate notice, often pay huge sums as compensation for unfair treatment. He therefore cautioned that termination at will is no longer acceptable in law, and employee relations and human resource practice must reflect this. President of SHRM Forum Ghana, Kojo Amissah, said the forum aims at bringing HR professionals together to see how they can move organisations forward. “People always say HR is about the people, and it leaves the business that people are supposed to do. So we think that when you focus on the business, we can then utilise the people to achieve business goals and move the business forward. “What we do is to advance the profession and help the professional to succeed; so we keep saying SHRM is ‘leading people, leading organisations’ because we want HR to start thinking about the business and help the business get to the top.”