Union wars leave workers broke

Mmegi Editor | Tuesday February 2, 2016 12:43

Each week, Batswana are fed allegations, counter allegations, denials and all manner of reprimands, as the federation and its former member drag each other over the coals. In order to avoid further inflaming the situation, we will not repeat some of the statements made thus far, save to say there have been many instances of unsavoury and even libellous narrative by either side.

The hostilities have increasingly become about personalities within both labour organisations and ad hominem attacks are daily fare in the various media employed by both sides in the conflict. As the labour bodies continue their conflict, the civil servants they ostensibly represent appear to be the least of their worries. Having just emerged from a year in which they received a non-inflation reflective wage adjustment, civil servants are almost certainly headed into another. Many are heavily indebted, often to the level of zero net pay, due largely to union leaders offering them on a platter to credit kings, through garnish agreements. Hire purchase service providers, lay-by schemes, loans, salary advances and other types of credit, combined with union soft loans and other commitments unfairly congregate on shrinking payslips. The civil servant is a prime target of credit providers in Botswana, representing a secure line of easy interest income and the unions who should be enhancing workers’ financial literacy and defending them from exploitative credit providers, are absorbed in ‘Tom and Jerry’ antics.

In the workplace, many of these workers are disempowered and at the mercy of managers who are emboldened by favourable labour laws. Each day, the worry-weary worker trudges off to a near inhospitable work environment, only to be greeted by frustration and despair.

The unions that workers pay to defend their interests and lift the burden off their shoulders are too busy mud-slinging to take notice of the rising alienation and anger.

To an extent, such indifference is to be expected. Far from their stated socialist beliefs, the country’s public labour movements are increasingly resembling the “hated” bourgeoisie, much like the pigs in George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm.

The rising wealth derived from subscriptions and investments and concentrated in the hands of those in hierarchy, has trapped some labour leaders in ivory towers of invincibility from which they only emerge, apparently contrite, at elective congresses.

Unions should beat their swords into ploughshares and work for the good of the members from whose hard-earned subscriptions they derive their lifeblood.

This would be a more beneficial use of the energies they evidently possess in Herculean quantities.

Today’s thought

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” 

 - African proverb