It is the third session. The gap has come down from 9% to 2.5%. Everyone in the room knows roughly where this is going to land. And yet nobody moves. If you work in employee or labour relations, you have sat in that room. You have watched a negotiation that was 80% done stall for three weeks, go to conciliation, pick up a strike notice, and settle in the end at a number that was on the table a month earlier, after everybody had lost a fortnight's production, salaries and a good deal of goodwill

The most important workplace developments of the week point in the same direction: organisations will increasingly be judged by the reality of how work is organised and how conflict is handled — not merely by the language of a contract, policy or values statement.

For the first time, a large volume of South African medico-legal disputes will pass through a mediation process as a matter of course rather than by exception. Whether that produces better outcomes is not yet known as the scheme is young and no outcome data has been published. But the opportunity is real, and there is a decade of evidence from a comparable public health system about what determines whether it is taken.