Stop the madness!
Mmegi Editor | Wednesday November 18, 2015 12:13
Last week, about 400 workers at African Copper’s Mowana Mine had their future thrown into a spin, after the employer told them of an impending liquidation application in the High Court.
In February, close to 830 of their colleagues at Boseto Mine were rendered jobless in one fell swoop after the operation went into liquidation due to viability issues.In the country’s factories, industrial class workers are systematically stripped of their already weakened bargaining strength by overlords empowered by skewed labour laws on their side.
In the commercial farms, labourers are treated only marginally better than the animals and crops they tend to, an obscenity that is glaringly evident whenever these farms roll into town to display their wares at agricultural shows.
Then there is the civil service, a hotbed of frustration, anger, anxiety and restlessness, where legislative screws tighten every Parliament session and the place that the ‘zero nett pay’ phenomenon calls home. In today’s edition, we report on the alleged assault of a union leader by managers of a haulage company. The unionist says his crime was to attempt to unionise the workers at the company, in response to their pleas for representation.
The situation is reminiscent of the plus 6,000 Choppies’ workers’ efforts to unionise and similar efforts by others in the private sector, an often overlooked sector of the labour market.
It is commonplace in Botswana for employers to resist the unionisation of their workers, by threats, delays or other shifty methods.
By law, employers are required to allow lawful unionists onto their premises for the purposes of recruiting and should negotiate recognition agreements once the union has secured a membership of at least a third of the workforce. Unfortunately, this picture perfect process does not always obtain in the labour market.
Management in new mining operations is notoriously tardy to implement recognition agreements. New mining operations are fraught with financial risks and an empowered workforce is viewed as an additional, unnecessary bother.
Even where workers are unionised, many are threatened and intimidated from actively pursuing union matters or addressing staff grievances. The system blatantly favours the employer, falsely believing the source of capital to be the source of economic growth, which actually is labour productivity. The labour inspectorate, Industrial Court and other statutory organs are either powerless or too overwhelmed to be adequately effective in restoring the dignity of long suffering workers.
Because at its heart, the conflict between employer and employees playing out across the labour-sphere is about dignity. President Ian Khama’s third ‘D, that of dignity speaks to the right of every Motswana and legal worker in Botswana to the wilful exchange of their labour, under mutual negotiation and compensation.
The madness, then, must stop.
Today’s thought
“Living in dignity must go hand in hand with being treated with dignity.”
- President Ian Khama