Who will save our factory workers?

Mmegi Correspondent | Friday May 9, 2014 13:23

From the feudal period, right through the industrial revolution and up to today, the relationship between employers and employees has been governed by agreements that seek to harmonise these mutually exclusive objectives. It is a highly dynamic relationship, consisting of intensive negotiations around the value of one’s labour, terms of service, workplace environment and ethos, and friction is inevitably a constant companion.

In Botswana, public eyes have traditionally focused on the friction between public servants and government, specifically around the quantum of wage review and the often acrimonious collective bargaining process. What lies beneath public scrutiny, however, is the fate of the thousands of factory workers across the country’s growing manufacturing sector, who revealed on May Day that their work lives make Asian sweat-shops appear charmingly quaint.Workplace hazards and accidents, lack of medical care, inhuman working hours and indifferent employers lurk behind the country’s factory walls from which we consume, wear and drink various “trusted” products and brands. Most disturbing are reports that more than 100 men had – for more than a year – been forced to use a bucket system for their ablution as toilets at their factory are blocked! The factory workers’ union claims to have repeatedly requested the Labour Inspectorate to intensify its examinations and hopefully catch out these sadistic employers, to no avail. Being a small proportion of the formally employed, factory workers find themselves with their backs against the wall, oppressed by employers, ignored by official regulators and overlooked by a public and media possessed with civil service strife. It is even more troubling that some of the greatest culprits in the naked violation of these workers’ rights are multinational corporations, who it was assumed subscribe to higher corporate governance principles, stemming from their international foundations. Instead, from what the workers’ union reports, where the multinational has an office in Botswana and South Africa, workers in the latter are not reporting the types of atrocities their colleagues in the former are facing. The difference is neither the militancy of the unions nor the variability of local management. The difference is labour law enforcement and South Africa, for all its much-publicised industrial relations disasters, has institutions far more vigilant in the protection of workers’ rights than Botswana.

Besides the sluggish labour inspectors, systemic prejudices mean a small union such as the one representing these factory workers, cannot afford an audience at the Industrial Court. The union has to continue kicking against the goads that are district labour offices, even though its grievances are at union and not employee level. As we head towards the October general vote, we call upon current and forthcoming legislators to prioritise the plight of factory and private sector workers in their post-election agendas.

The current goings-on have no room in our culture and our aspirations as a nation.

                                                                      Today’s thought

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

 

                                                               - Martin Luther King, Jr.