Parliament is amending the national minimum wage law just two weeks after the groundbreaking legislation which provides for ordinary workers to be paid at least R20 an hour came into effect.

It emerged at a special meeting of the labour portfolio committee yesterday that in the rush to pass the bill under tight deadlines last year, an error backdating the implementation of the bill to May 2017 slipped through the cracks during the processing of the proposed law in parliament.

The committee resolved to bring its own bill to amend the cross-referencing error in the National Minimum Wage Act, signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa last month. It came into effect on January 1.

The amendment will not affect the implementation of the law and MPs were at pains to stress that the law was in full effect, so employers had to comply with it.

The "mishap", as described by committee chairperson Lemias Mashile, was around a section of the new bill which protects workers from employers who tried to get around the new law ahead of its implementation.

The section was not promulgated with the bill.

The amendment makes it an unfair labour practice for employers to unilaterally change working conditions ahead of the implementation of the act.

As it stands, the section says the national minimum wage is retrospective to May 2017, which means that everyone who was getting less than R20 an hour could claim back pay to May 2017.

DA MP Michael Bagraim, who alerted the committee to the error last year, expressed his unhappiness yesterday that he was ignored.

He said he later wrote to the presidency requesting the president not to promulgate the section otherwise "we were going to have unions issuing summonses for back pay, because it would have been law".

Bagraim also lamented the money spent to convene yesterday's meeting including travel costs.

Mashile claimed they did not act at the time because "work done in parliament is not done abruptly just because someone else has a feeling ."