As a senior commissioner for the CCMA, Jan Theron was appointed to arbitrate a dispute referred by the trade union South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) concerning the proposed privatisation (or outsourcing) of cleaning services in Khayelitsha, which was then part of the City of Tygerberg (since incorporated into the Cape Town metro).
In terms of the Constitution, waste removal is a local government responsibility. What the City proposed was to engage a contractor, Billy Hattingh, to perform this function in certain areas of Khayelitsha on its behalf. SAMWU was utterly opposed to this, and the legislation that now permits local governments to do what the City envisaged, the Municipal Systems Act, was not yet adopted.
This may have been the first attempt to privatise municipal services in a major metropolitan area. Jan Theron's award (in favour of SAMWU) was taken on review to the Labour Court, which reversed the award. Since then all the major metropolitan areas place rely on external service providers to provide certain services, with workers employed by these service providers in some cases earning less than half the wages earned by those ‘directly’ employed by the City, doing equivalent work.