Strike action threat forces U-turn on wage freeze

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By Staff Reporter

THE Zimbabwe government has made a spectacular U-turn on a decision to freeze wages and salaries after the country’s main labour union threatened two days of strikes on September 19 and 20.

State media reports on Sunday said Labour Minister Nicholas Goche would announce amendments to the two-week old legislation, allowing employers to raise wages for employees through collective bargaining.

Statutory Instrument 159A of 2007 Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) (Amendment of National Incomes and pricing Commission Act and Education Act)
Regulations, froze all wages, commodity prices and school fees.

“Salaries and wages have not been frozen but government will continue to give employers scope to increase incomes while work is underway to amend salary regulations gazetted recently,” the official Sunday Mail newspaper reported.

“Although details of the amendments remain sketchy, Goche indicated that the matter would be finalised on Tuesday,” the paper added.

The minister said amendments referred to incomes (wages), with the rest of the Statutory Instrument’s provisions unchanged.

The instrument also regulates rentals, service charges, among other items.

The ZCTU announced last week that it would call a two-day job stay-away to force the government to reduce the “evil” legislation.

The law said no employer could raise wages and salaries for the next six months, even where the consumer price index had gone up, or the foreign exchange rate had shifted.

The law also stipulates that remuneration should not be increased in anticipation of an increase in the consumer price index (CPI) or exchange rate.

Part of the new legislation said: “Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, no employer shall increase the remuneration of any employee to a level that would result in an increase of the remuneration equal to or in excess of that arrived at by applying any standard referred to in paragraph (a), (b), or (c).

“Any provision of a collective bargaining agreement which provides for the remuneration of any employee to be increased or negotiated in a manner or for a
reason, as they case may be, which is inconsistent with subsection (1) shall be void.”

ZCTU President Lovemore Matombo said the wage freeze only benefited employers. Workers, he said, would only benefit if the CPI was used to determine salaries and wages.

“The rise in prices is reflected in the CPI. Workers look at the percentage increase over the stipulated review period. But the current situation essentially means workers are barred from negotiating salaries,” Matombo said.

The Sunday Mail claimed that a “few workers” it interviewed “express relief to learn that the government had not in fact frozen their earnings”.

Government source said Sunday that the U-turn was made over fears the ZCTU action could cause further chaos to a battered economy.

One minister said: “We will be taking a formal and collective decision in Cabinet on Tuesday, after which the Minister of Labour will proceed and gazette changes to the instrument. We can’t afford a strike of the magnitude of what the ZCTU is planning.”

Zimbabwe is in the middle of economic crisis which escalated in the last months when the government went on a campaign to reduce prices, causing critical shortages in shops.

The government has responded to the crisis through ad hoc policies and legislation which have caused more complexities, forcing it to make numerous U-turns.

The government made a U-turn on a policy to monopolise petroleum imports after the country dried up, and a made another U-turn on banning private abattoirs after the state owned Cold Storage Company dismally failed to cater for the country’s beef needs.

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