TAWU protests automatic public service salary increment
Oarabile Mosikare | Wednesday April 2, 2014 11:26
Last week Ian Khama announced that government will award a four percent salary increment to public servants effective April 1, 2014. On Monday, the Director of Public Service Management Carter Morupisi released a statement to the effect that government has decided to offer a four percent salary adjustment to certain public officers including the Botswana Defence Force (BDF), the Botswana Police Service, the Prisons Service, the Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS), the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) and the executive management cadre.
This did not go down well with TAWU which charged that the exclusive award of increment to security forces and senior management is borne from the erroneous view that these cadres are equally excluded from bargaining outcomes.
“Senior management (E2 and above) are not legally barred from unionising or bargaining - save for membership to unions in the general bargaining unit and the right to strike,” said TAWU secretary general Frizon Moyo.
Moyo also said the law allows them to unionise as a management bargaining unit, a choice that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions left to domestic legislation.
“They are incidentally excluded while security forces are legally excluded. For them to be entitled to an automatic increase on the basis of being ineligible to unionise, when they made a free choice not to unionise, confers an undue benefit from public funds,” said Moyo.
The unionist viewed the wholesale categorisation of the security cluster as unfair.
“A special constable is classified equally with the BDF and Police Commanders and DIS, who are senior management. The separate increment is therefore an academic exercise whose effect is only to divide employees and undermine collective bargaining.”
The TAWU boss said they believe that ‘senior management’ seeks to directly benefit from the bargaining process, actively participating and simultaneously benefiting as an excluded party. He said: “They want to continue to influence outcomes in a new dispensation just as they used to draft Terms of Reference for Salary Commissions.”
TAWU would also be interested in the proportional effect of ‘senior management’ salaries and these social protection costs on the wage bill, as it believes these are unduly influencing negotiations. Non-unionised and other employees belonging to unions not in the bargaining council are legally excluded by the constitution of the council, he said. “It would be unlawful and unfair to exclude employees not participating or represented in the bargaining process from both the employer’s automatic increase and the ATB adjustments. Such view could hold without a unified pay structure and standardised conditions.”
By entrenching union monopoly and excluding TAWU and the Botswana Nurses Union (BONU), Moyo said the Botswana Federation of Public Sector Unions (BOFEPUSU) is playing into the hands of the employer and lending itself as a pawn in a game where only government is a pre-determined winner in the long run. He said they believe that their exclusion could be denying workers a valuable contribution, even though they may be smaller or belonging to different affiliations.
“In closing, we remind comrades that “Workers-Divided-will-Always-be-Defeated”, which is the flipside of the international slogan on workers’ solidarity,” he said.