South Africa has three main labour laws, namely the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Labour Relations Act, and the Employment Equity Act.

The Constitution of South Africa , Act 108 of 1996 was adopted on 10 May 1996 and came into effect on 4 February 1997. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, binding on all organs of State at all levels of government. South Africa is a State founded on the principles of a constitutional democracy.

The 1996 Constitution is the successor of the earlier interim Constitution, Act 200 of 1993, which was brought into effect on 27 April 1994, following the first democratic elections in South Africa. The interim Constitution was the product of months of negotiations and effectively secured the demise of the ten year old tri-cameral constitutional system and the apartheid regime, which flowed from it.

The Country is organized as a central State, which has been divided into nine provinces.

The Constitution provides for three branches of Government, namely, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The Constitution gives recognition to the doctrine of separation of powers by providing a range of various mechanisms which have been designed to distribute power between the different spheres and levels of government and to introduce various institutional checks and balances so as to prevent the abuse of state power.